July 2007 - Billie Paea

What a busy month, travelling to the USA with the New Zealand hip hop teams for the World Hip Hop Champs in Los Angeles. It's one of the highlights of my year. Organising the trip was full on; fundraising, organising the NZ teams, meetings teams from other crews from around the world and travelling to different dance studios. I now have a new outlook on how we do hip hop dance here in NZ.

Nine teams were present at the champs. NZ made themselves known by performing a Haka in front of all the countries on orientation day - a memorable moment. And this year saw the largest amount of entries in the history of the competition. Fearless Dance Crew from Rotorua took the bronze medal in the Varsity section, which was an amazing achievement and the only medal for NZ.

DZIAH ranked in tenth place overall out of 38 teams in the adult section final. It was a tough competition but we gained the respect from the crowd - having them on their feet for the whole routine (no other team achieved that in the entire competition)! We made our mark and received so much positive feedback on our style of dance. Other countries want to visit NZ because of this and I feel inspired to keep going. We built some great networks for our dance academy and it was a major success in bringing people together through our passion of dance.

We were taken care of by a San Diego Studio where we got to take classes free of charge. We got to watch their top crew from Studio 429. So much talent and it was good to see others doing the same thing in another country! Another studio we visited was Culture Shock Dance Center - one of the biggest hip hop dance companies in the world (with branches all over the world). Like us they're inspiring youth using dance to connect with people and I can see we are on the right track. Youth have so much potential - it's about harnessing this energy and putting it into something positive rather than destructive.

I bring back the knowledge of how others are running their studios and it was interesting to see the level of dance in the USA ... some of the best dancing I have ever seen. They are so passionate about the whole dance culture and I want to bring this flavour back to NZ; to impact our nation and create more opportunities for NZ youth to experience.

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