Undergraduate Variety Show

Margaret and I will be traveling in-country for the next seven days, so it will be awhile before we can post again. Here are several entertaining videos I shot at the three day variety show at the College of Nursing and Public Health. We are confident you will enjoy them. They should keep you busy until we post again. To view the videos, you may need to click on the website link. They may take a while to load depending on your download speed. You may need to exit and re-enter the post after each video.

Dance is an integral part of Bhutanese culture and education. Compulsory dance classes in the schools begin at age 5 and continue through high school. At Margaret’s school of 1500 students, the Spring dance concert is a three day affair and highly competitive. The standard for performance is perfection.

These are not professional dancers, nor are they professional dance students. These young people are studying to be counselors, lab and radiology technicians, nurses and the like.

The Bhutanese strike me as a reserved people. When I’m teaching, the students are quite soft-spoken and shy. It was wonderful to watch them cut loose with this amazing, even passionate, outlet. Pretty cool to hear the audience cut loose as well.

The students spent the afternoons before the shows preparing food in a makeshift outdoor kitchen; datshi, curry, roti, momos and pakora, along with butter tea and milk tea. Food was sold under a tent at intermission. The proceeds will go toward the class picnic. (Picnics are very popular here. I went recently to charge my cell phone and Tashi Cell was closed for an office picnic!)

Bhutan is a small country but historically with many cultures separated by mountainous terrain. There are 19 primary languages here. The dances reflect this diversity as well as modern exposure to the outside world as the country has opened its doors.

We just couldn’t get enough of these kids and came back for the third night.

To wrap things up, here is a video from another event, the B-Happy dance competition about one month ago in Coronation Park. This was a ten day event featuring 116 competitive dance teams.

So…B Happy. We’ll post again after our return to Thimphu.