- #Concert or Performance
- #Arts
- #Indian/Bollywood
The University of Pittsburgh and the Steel City Sapna(SCS) board members are very excited to announce the fifth annual SCS competition on February 6th, 2021. SCS is an organization run entirely by students aimed at unifying a broad range of students through artistic enterprise. SCS showcases dancing, singing, and storytelling by mixing various South Asian genres and styles with Western forms with an ultimate goal of paying forward to the Greater Pittsburgh community. Despite being only five years old, SCS has managed to attract the top talent from across the nation and leave an influential impact on the national South Asian dancing and singing platforms. This progress has translated into thousands of attendees from across the North American continent, thousands of dollars raised, and countless amounts of social media interactions relating to SCS. SCS is the only event in the entire Pittsburgh area to bring together the most well-known South Asian collegiate dance and a cappella teams from this nation’s top universities.
The success of this year’s event is predicated by the recurring successes of the past four years, which were made possible through hundreds of dedicated college student volunteers and symbiotic partnerships with companies that believe and promote freedom of expression & unity. In the past, we have relied on very generous and supportive individual donors, small businesses, and large corporations to help produce beneficial impacts in our home city, Pittsburgh. Through donations, we can reduce operating costs and increase the size of our philanthropic donations.
This year we are ecstatic to announce that all the proceeds from the show will go towards the Make-A-Wish Foundation! Oddly enough, sapna in Hindi means “dream” and our main goal is making “dreams come true”. The Make-A-Wish is a nonprofit organization founded in the United States that creates life-changing wishes for children with critical illnesses. Make-A-Wish has the vision to grant the wish of every child diagnosed with a critical illness. In the United States a wish is granted every 34 minutes which means every 34 minutes a child obtains rejuvenated strength, perseverance, and hope. One wish can greatly improve an affected child’s quality of life, by contributing to SCS you can help make their dreams come true.
As mentioned earlier, sapna is a Hindi word that translates in English as ‘dream’. The dream we wish to present is a competition in which dancers, singers, judges, volunteers, audience members, and partners all gain a memorable experience and insight into South Asian culture. SCS is the largest dance and a cappella competition in the entire western Pennsylvania region. Teams from universities located all across the United States land at Carnegie Music Hall and compete to win a trophy, a spot to compete at the national level and much more.. SCS is an official competition of the national Desi Dance Network, a non-profit organization which has been successfully bringing together countless dancers nationwide, combating cultural erasure, and bringing color representation to the mainstream, as well as All American Awaaz, which strives to bring representation to South Asian music via a cappella. Our goal as an organization, as well as a collective of passionate individuals, is to raise awareness of South Asian culture and to unify performers from different circuits through exploring professional and personal interests while allowing the performers a chance to present their talent on the stage. Planning for this competition involves logistically planning the weekend, providing food for 300 people for 4 meals each, as well as providing attendees gifts such as t-shirts for performing in the competition. We hope to cater to every request of those who wish to participate in our annual competition by providing the best available resources.
This competition is attended not only by Pitt college students but also thousands of members of the Pittsburgh community & other college students from Carnegie Mellon University, Chatham University, Carlow University, and Duquesne University. In addition to our physical audience, a large-scale virtual audience is present via real-time live-streaming; last year, our virtual audience was composed of over ten thousand members. Since our event will reach the minds and hearts of many people in attendance, it is vital that we use our platform to properly showcase our culture and values. This competition represents more than a night of entertainment and unity: it is a catalyst to spread the rich history of South Asian cultures & to increase intersectionality between ethnic communities.
If you can, please consider donating to help us reach our goal and donate to this amazing charity!
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