Invisible Children postponement upsets some

When Invisible Children announced that its “Word for the Unheard” dance was to be postponed to Feb. 11, members of the MAP program were disappointed to hear that their plans to organize a dance of their own were thwarted.

The Invisible Children’s dance, which was originally scheduled for Nov. 5, was postponed because no member of the school tech crew was available to set up the stage needed for the dance, junior Invisible Children co-president Haley Wong said. Had Invisible Children hired someone to do the work, the club would have lost about $1,000 paying for labor.

The next available date for a dance was in February, which happened to coincide with a dance that the MAP program was planning.

“The only date that they could find was the date that we had already chosen, Feb. 11 and because they chose that date, the administrators said that they didn’t want to commit to two dances and so we have to combine our dances or only one of them is going to happen,” senior MAP student Gautam Bhayani said.

According to Bhayani, the MAP dance was planned to be an “electro-house dance.”

“Basically electronic music was the whole theme. It was essentially a school-friendly rave,” Bhayani said.

The MAP-hosted dance was originally the idea of seniors Mark Van Aken and Robert Belpasso.

“We’ve been thinking about hosting an electronic music dance for some time, since they barely play any electronic music at dances,” Van Aken said. “So a few months ago [senior] Marshall Westall thought that we should propose the idea to the MAP heads and they approved it.”

Although MAP obtained the three required teacher approvals, the group could not finalize a date with the administration because of the conflict with Invisible Children.
As a compromise, Invisible Children and MAP are working to combine both their ideas into one dance.

“Not much has been done because we need to figure out the whole budget thing. Like how much profit each side is going to get. How much money we’re going to put in,” Bhayani said. “We’re probably going to do something soon. Worst case [MAP] can do a dance that’s outside of school.”