Cultural winner Masti gets low. Photograph: Justin Knight

The lobby of Robsham Theater became a campground late last January. Chris Denice ’09 and two suitemates arrived at 1:30 a.m., only to find that 39 other students had shown up even earlier, all prepared to spend the night and await the opening of the box office at nine. While Denice and his friends rotated naps and line duty, others stayed up, played cards, chatted, did homework.

It was the last day of ticket sales for the Showdown, an annual dance competition produced by the AHANA Leadership Council (ALC), in which Boston College dance troupes and culture clubs vie for a two-foot trophy and, more importantly, yearlong bragging rights, on the basis of five- to 10-minute routines. This year’s six judges were professional dancers, instructors, and choreographers with backgrounds from Broadway to break-dance to ballet. At the end of the night they would announce a winner and runner-up in both the dance and cultural dance categories.

The Showdown has become one of the premier events sponsored by ALC, a semi-autonomous branch of the Undergraduate Government of Boston College. ALC was created in the fall of 1995 as a “space for students of color interested in student government, and to provide services for AHANA students specifically,” according to Noelle Green ’07, current ALC president. The organization includes a volunteer corps (which sponsored a service trip to Turkey Creek, Mississippi, this year) and a political action collective that Green says “plans events that fulfill ALC’s mission to educate students on issues facing the AHANA community.” ALC organizes an annual boat cruise of Boston Harbor in the fall and a formal ball in the spring.

The brainchild of Jessica Muriel ’03 and Brandon Slaughter ’05, former programming directors for ALC, the first Showdown took place in Robsham Theater in 2002. Four years later, the event moved to the basketball courts of the Plex (Flynn Recreation Complex). The shift was born of necessity. In addition to selling out Robsham’s 591 seats, the show had grown to more than 200 performers. Now, transforming the cavernous gym into a 1,500-seat auditorium each year involves a $17,000 ALC budget and the hiring of a production company to erect the stage, lights, sound system, and seating.

This year’s sales plan was to put up a third of the tickets (at $10, limited to five per student) each day for three days. “[We] definitely sold out within the first 35 to 40 minutes,” says Stephanie Sanabria ’09, a member of ALC who was present for the first two days of the sale. Sanabria estimates that at least 100 people left the box office empty-handed each morning.

The night of Saturday January 27 was a busy one on Lower Campus’s south side. There was a seven o’clock hockey game scheduled across Campanella Way, while outside the Plex a throng of students had begun to gather late in the afternoon, to await Showdown’s eight o’clock showtime. An hour before the lights went up, the line of ticket-holders eager to get in out of the frosty night stretched the length of the building. “They should really have this thing in Conte Forum,” a young man in the queue muttered, expressing the dream of many of Showdown’s organizers.

Inside the Plex, R&B tunes pumped from massive speakers at the front of the gym as savvy audience members—mostly students, some family of the performers—colluded here and there to rearrange the folding chairs and construct offshoot sections for better sight lines. That left small pockets of the floor in the seating area open for spontaneous dancing.

This year, six teams would compete in the dance category: Fuego del Corazon, Synergy, Phaymus, FISTS (short for “Females Incorporating Sisterhood Through Step”), and two groups visiting from Boston University, Fusion and Vibes. The dance category was actually something of a catchall. Fuego performed salsa and merengue-inspired Latin dance; Synergy, Phaymus, Fusion, and Vibes executed various forms of hip-hop, including break-dance, pop-and-lock, and street jazz.

“Pop-and-lock is a style that focuses on isolation of the body, attempting to move only one joint of the body at a particular point in time,” explains Synergy’s director, Whitnie Low ’07. “Street jazz is standard jazz with an urban feel—gravity is taken into account—whereas studio jazz is more lifted and extended, much like ballet.”

FISTS, the only step team, closed the three-hour show with a crisp, high-powered routine about toy soldiers who tire of doing what they’re told. Their clapping, yelling, and elaborate stomping produced a beat in the absence of recorded music.

This year’s competitors in the cultural category were AeroK, the dance troupe of the Korean Students Association; Danse Kreyol, from the campus Haitian Association; Masti, from the South Asian Students Association; the Philippine Society of Boston College (PSBC); and Presenting Africa To U (PATU), affiliated with the African Students Association. Their costumes, music, and moves reflected ethnic roots, but their renditions were not, strictly speaking, grandma’s and grandpa’s. Masti’s women, for instance, wore authentic Indian jewelry (pendulous earrings, necklaces, and tikkas, the headpieces with a pendant that rests on the forehead), offset by gold-striped black T-shirts and tight black pants; the men made a mid-routine switch from jeans and shimmering gold button-downs to billowing pathani suits. PSBC blended hip-hop and tinikling, the Philippine dance in which dancers hop between horizontal bamboo poles as partners crouch on the floor and rhythmically tap the poles against each other. The updated version drew a steady surge of cheers. All night, as the bass thumped in the speakers and strobe lights flashed blue, yellow, and red, the audience danced and clapped along. When Fuego flawlessly executed an intricate, six-dancer baseball cap swap, and when a male Synergy dancer spun into a fast, prolonged pirouette, the approving whistles and whoops nearly drowned out the music.

“There’s always an argument after the contest,” said Nijah Cunningham ’07, codirector of programming for ALC, a few hours before the show started. This year was no different. After 11 performances and a break for deliberation by the judges, Green and ALC vice president Rose Chou ’07 emerged from backstage to announce the winners. Synergy and AeroK picked up second-place honors, while an overjoyed Masti won first place in the cultural performance bracket. FISTS was announced the winner of the dance category, but with the crowd noises and the unfortunate similarity of the names, members of Phaymus took the stage. This left FISTS to wait on the sidelines while the misunderstanding was cleared up and the trophy was taken from Phaymus, whose members (25 in all) were already raising it overhead amid cheers from the crowd.

The night’s confusion and hurt feelings have since prompted public debate about Showdown’s competitive component, including dueling columns in the Heights student newspaper. Under the headline “Almost Phaymus,” Nidia Fevry ’10, of Phaymus, wrote that Showdown “pits apples and oranges against each other and asks judges to decide which is better. . . . Imagine Drumline against the Boston Symphony.” In rebuttal, Seif Ammus ’08, of ALC, offered this advice: “Why not just step up the routines to the level of groups like FISTS?” Within days, a Facebook group formed that proclaimed Phaymus “the people’s champ.” Green says the incident was unfortunate, but that in the long run the controversy only adds to the legend of Showdown. “Each year, the competition itself becomes more and more fierce,” she says. “There’s a history building.”

Read more by Tim Czerwienski