Page 41 - Blog 2015 - Korea in Canada

KoREa In Canada
KoREa-Canada Blog 2015

Canadian Youtubers, bloggers, commentators and performers were gathered at the Metro
Toronto Convention Centre. Even at Toronto’s annual Korean dano Spring Festival, K-pop
Me, gathered performers from Toronto, ottawa and Montreal to compete in their K-pop
cover contest. These events offer cash prizes and gifts that performers take with them, and
more recently, there has been an advent of global competitions that offer dancers the chance
to perform at Korea.
Hosted by KBS, the K-PoP World Festival is a global K-pop cover contest in which
dancers and singers representing various countries around the world will have a chance to
perform in Korea. It involves dancers and singers competing at their ‘local preliminaries’,
followed by an online screening process, in which 12-15 teams will be invited by KBS to
perform at the finals.

In Canada, it was decided that there was to be two preliminary rounds — one in Toronto
th
on June 20 , and one in ottawa on July 18 . Hosted by the Consulate general of the Republic
th
of Korea and organized by U of T’s Korean Students association, the Toronto preliminaries
met a generous crowd and a great selection of performers. Judges were faced with 17
contestants, and as a performer myself, I was rarely not screaming or jumping off my seat to
support the other contestants. Cherie, Exene, 6K.g, Underground Pulse and R.P.M, were
just some of the dancers that competed, however, in the end, it was the ottawa Hallyu dance
Team that won first place, R.P.M. placed second, and Underground Pulse placed third. nikki
and Hani won the Judges’ Special Selection, while ala won first place in the singing category.
By placing first on both the performing categories and the singing category, oHdT and ala
will now advance to the online semi-finals and will potentially be able to compete at the

39