KATHMANDU, JULY 26
Six Nepali K-pop dance cover teams have been selected to take part in the K-Pop World Festival scheduled to be held in South Korea.
The four teams - BMK (Boys Meet Kpop), Dre_Kpop (Dream in K-pop), 3A PM, and Crimson Yeoja won in the Dance Performance category, while The Wings, and Hearts to Beat (H2B) won in the Impressive Story category of K-pop World Festival 2021 in Nepal, securing their places in the global festival.
A total of 53 teams including solo performers had participated in the national level competition held from June 28 to July 16.
Sujina Byanjankar, Consular Assistant at the Embassy of the Republic of Korea, informed that the winners were selected on the basis of their choreography and uniformity, expression and performance in dance performance category, while under the Impressive Story category, the evaluation was made on the basis of their personal statements on K-pop.
The competition was held virtually where the contestants had uploaded their dancing videos on YouTube and they were adjudged on the basis of those videos.
These six teams will now take part in the preliminary round of K-Pop World Festival in South Korea which will also be held virtually, as per Byanjankar.
"We used to select only top three teams as winners in the previous years while the first and the second winning teams could participate in the festival in South Korea. This is the first time six teams are going to take part in the preliminary round of the K-Pop World Festival," she informed and added that the vocal performance category this year however had been removed from the competition.
According to Byanjankar, the Embassy will send the videos of these winning teams by July 31 to South Korea to take part in the festival for cover dance and singing competition.
They will be selected for the final round if they get selected in this preliminary round.
Prince Shahi, one of the members of the BMK who ranked first in the competition said, "It was really shocking to know that we were ranked first as we were expecting to be the sixth.
Maybe we won because we tried to show the culture between Korea and Nepal with our choreography, dynamics of dance and camera shots." The group had performed in Black Swan (BTS) and Given Taken (Enhypen) for the competition.
Prajwol Lama, a member of the Dre_K-Pop that stood second shared, "We are students and we managed time for our online classes and making this video. We worked hard, we had some hope and dream to make our family happy and to represent Nepal in the K-pop festival. Now we are happy that we have reached the first stage of this dream." The group had performed in two numbers of BTS - On and I Need You.
All six winning teams have won cash prizes, too.
A version of this article appears in the print on July 27 2021, of The Himalayan Times.
