For the last 18 weeks of my life I’ve been working on coming up with marketing plans and materials for Caderas Latinas’ main annual event – Bailamos Para Siempre, Spanish for “We Dance Forever”, an event that’s taken a lot of out me in terms of personal time, energy, ideas and resources. But on balance I think I’ve learnt a lot about dance and event management and marketing work and a host of other things, so it hasn’t been a total waste of time.







Briefly, this event is, like last year’s, a gathering of Latin dancers from the 4 universities and RP for a night of performances and social dancing at Zouk. Questionable that I’m touting such an event, given where I’m coming from, but I know the event enough to know what it is (a celebration of dance, a quasi-dance production, a Latin social dancing night) and what it isn’t (a night of drunken revelry, flesh fest).

So the details are as follows:

Thu 22nd Jan 09
7:30pm till late
Zouk
Tickets $18 available at bailamos.sg

Angeline has been wonderful in doing up the beautiful event website. One of the things I’ve learnt about this event is the wonderful talents that people bring to the fore and contribute to the event when they have the right motivation and attitude. Shu Hua has also been a solid rock all through this time – a quiet Year 1 girl who has been 100% reliable and conscientious with regards to every task I give her. Thank God for these people.

Everything in this experience, from theme determination to logo design, from poster artwork to photoshoot, has been a multi-faceted challenge both creatively and practically. I struggle to even remember the start of this process and I know I’ll have oodles of trouble when I attempt to write all of my collected experiences down on in a coherent format for my Marketing successor.

I’ve also experienced a fair bit of frustration and regret as I find myself meeting obstacles, especially with the huge number of people and organizations that I have to work with. Without going into too much detail or naming anyone in particular, I’ve witnessed first-hand how lazy and unreasonable and tardy people can be, and how selfish people can be when defending what they regard as their personal interests and seeking to maximize their own happiness. If anything, it’s given me an idea of what to look for when figuring out a place to settle down to work – the people one works with are of utmost importance.

Well in about another 10 days all of this will be over – and however the event goes down, I will walk away knowing that I put 100% of myself into this event. I’ve made more than my fair share of sacrifices and bled my inspiration dry for this event, and many times it still wasn’t enough for some people. There were plenty of junctures that I could have given up and walked away and feel justified, but God was merciful – he sustained me and prevented me from doing anything rash in my moments of anger.

In any case, this will be a great event – not the best out there, but certainly enough for you to sit up and take notice (and of course come for the event). So if you’re reading this and you’re above 18 and consider yourself still young and cool enough to come to a club and watch Joel and lots of other sexy people dance, do let me know!