Ready for the world

Today, five weary representatives from the Philippines return from a foreign trip, bringing back learnings and experiences that will serve them well in future sports competition. And no, they aren’t basketball players, boxers or billiards players.

They’re dancers.

The small contingent from the Philippine Professional Dance Sport Association competed in the 2002 Singapore Superstar International Dancesport Championships after rigorous preparation. You won’t find their names in the sports pages, save perhaps in The STAR. But they may well become world-famous in the next two to five years.

Andrei Roslovtsev and Anna Coloma are a new pair who have, individually, made their mark on Philippine dance. Roslovtsev is a Russian who has been training since childhood in the best ballet schools in the world. In the last couple of years, he has turned his attention to ballroom, with great success.

His partner, Anna Coloma, has made an even deeper impression on the world stage. With a limited training regimen over a span of mere months, Coloma and Gifford Gavieres (younger brother of former FEU and Iloilo MegaVoltz coach Danny Gavieres) raised the bar of Filipino dance sport practitioners. At the 2001 World Dance and Dance Sport Council (WD & DSC) World Professional Ten Dance Championship, Gavieres and Coloma, competing against hundreds of other couples who had years of experience on them, finished a respectable 35th. Just to give you an idea of the impact of this, placing in the top 25 would cement your reputation as one of the greatest dancers in the world, and you’d be made.

"It’s still a very small organization, and we have a lot of work ahead of us," admits Stan Alexander, a known dancer, trainor and adjudicator from Australia who migrated to the Philippines and assembled the PPDSA.

"Ideally, we should be sending four couples abroad every month. But that would mean raising P500,000 a month."

So for Singapore, they sent only two pairs, the second being the juvenile tandem of Bulacan’s Eric Yumul, 11, and Eunice Reyes, 8. With a little over a year’s worth of training, Yumul and Reyes have already won their first international title. In April, they placed first in Junior Standard and second in Junior Latin in the Hong Kong International Dancing 2002 Championship.

But the big guns of the PPDSA are preparing for bigger competitions.

Alberto Dimarucut and Deborah Civardi finished a credible 45th at the WD & DSC World Professional Latin Championships, in a competition that featured over 60 countries. They have won titles in Australia and Taiwan.

Gifford (pronounced jee-ford) Gavieres has perhaps the most inexhaustible potential among all the PPDSA members. Australia, which has one of the most stringent standards in the world, has accredited Gavieres to teach in both Latin and Ballroom. His ability to carry any partner is amazing.

It is a testament to the fortitude of the PPDSA that they get to compete abroad at all. They train on the open-air roof of a building along Kamias road in Quezon City, with car exhaust swirling all around them and the heat of the sun going through the metal roof above their heads. None of them own any cars, and they commute to and from all their engagements, even their preview at the Riverbend Hotel last Wednesday, which ended past midnight. Alexander trains them all for free, and they have responded.

"I think that, with all the sacrifices they have made, in two to five years’ time, they’ll be among the best in the world," Alexander says, dead serious.

Unfortunately, with the lack of media exposure, the PPDSA is still having a hard time raising the funds they need to expand their training programs. And, since they are professionals, they may have a hard time getting support from the Philippine Sports Commission. But, like the ShoeMart ice skating team before them, they continue to reap success, given their limited resources.

What more if they had the money they needed.