Participants in the second annual Ballroom Blitz fundraiser at the Eatonia Community Hall gather for a photo on Nov. 10 after their performances. (Back row left to right) Jennifer Bews, Brooke Thome, Matt Owens, Joel MacDonald, BJ Somerville, Steven Kanasevich, Chris Oscar and Craig Bews. (Front row left to right) Lindsay Larock, Jennifer Barclay-Rosher, Skye Stimson, Yvette Schuh and Lisa King.
Kenneth Brown
of The Crossroads
A group of trained dancers and their celebrity partners have competed and entertained a large crowd at a special fundraiser held last weekend in Eatonia.
(At right) Partners Jenniver Barclay-Rosher and Joel MacDonald, who won the judges’ choice award, do a little dance as they get down in a disco number.
The second annual Ballroom Blitz event took place on Nov. 10 at the Eatonia Community Hall. The event has helped to raise more than $36,000 for the Eatonia Centennial Committee. Proceeds from the Ballroom Blitz events will support the community’s 100-year celebration in 2020.
Ballroom Blitz is a celebrity dance competition not unlike Dancing with the Stars. The main difference was there is no national viewing audience, but the event features several of the components of the televised version familiar to most people.
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Hosts Kimberley Becker and Sam Somerville kept the show rolling. At the start of the event, the hosts provided various details and welcomed people to the fundraiser. The event featured participants from Eatonia, Eston, Kindersley and Leader. There were six dance pairings and one dance trio in the competition.
Becker said it is really nice to see so many communities coming together to support the event and the cause. The dancers also compete for their own charities and, while the winners get $5,000 to split between their charities, each of the charities receives a small donation.
Somerville told the audience that the celebrities began working with the trained dancers in September and they were able to practice as much or as little as they wanted. There were two main winners on the night, so a judges’ and a people’s choice winner.
There were four judges at the event and they scored the seven dance teams from 1-10. The judges’ choice was based on the scores while the people’s choice was based on votes. As for the voting, every dollar donated to a dance team earned the partners one vote, so the pair or trio with the most donations was declared as the overall winner.
The four judges were then introduced to the crowd and the group included two expert judges and two non-expert judges. The expert judges were Tasha Orysiuk of Edmonton, a former Eatonia resident, and Tiffany Wagner of Eatonia.
The non-expert judges were the only two returning judges from the inaugural Ballroom Blitz in 2017, so they were back by popular demand.
The two non-experts were local guys Kiley Swan and Brian Francis. Each judge would give a critique of each dance team after they had finished, but the non-expert judges gave much less technical advice.
As for the dance duos, they included Chris Oscar, a former principal at Eaton School in Eatonia and current principal of Westberry Elementary School in Kindersley, and Yvette Schuh of Eatonia; Brooke Thome, the celebrity, of Eston and Jennifer Bews of Eatonia; Joel MacDonald, a business owner in Kindersley, and Jennifer Barclay-Rosher of Kindersley; Matt Owens, who works at Emerge Ag Solutions in Eston, and Lindsay Larock of Eatonia; BJ Somerville, an athlete from Eatonia, and Skye Stimson of Leader; and Lisa King, the principal at Eaton School, and Steven Kanasevich of Eatonia. The dance trio was Craig Bews, an Eatonia-based farmer, with Jennifer Bews and Larock.
The dancers were introduced at the beginning of the show, and then they were each introduced to the audience before their performances with the help of a brief video. The hosts, Becker and Sam, went to dance practices to film the videos.
There was also a special guest dancer at the event. Kylan Wagner of Eatonia, an award-winning dancer who won a competition in 2016 to dance on stage at a Justin Bieber concert, was the guest dancer and he performed twice during the course of the event.
Each of the judges was also given an opportunity to critique Kylan’s second performance, but his mother, Tiffany, simply told him she is proud of him and proud that he is always eager wherever he goes to tell people he is from Eatonia. In one of several funny moments from the non-expert judges, Swan told Kylan he has watched River Dance before, and maybe the dancer should not move his upper body so much.
In the end, the pairing of MacDonald and Barclay-Rosher, who performed a disco number, were selected by the judges as their top choice at the event. The people’s choice winner for the competition was the pairing of Oscar and Schuh, who mixed disco with a bit of country flare. Oscar and Schuh ended up with a whopping 14,623 votes.
Oscar said in an interview from before he knew the result that he believes all of the dance teams performed better at the main event than the previous night’s dress rehearsal. He said there were fewer people at the rehearsal, but it helped to prepare them for Saturday.
He noted that he told organizers he would dance in the competition right away when he was asked, but he got cold feet about 10 minutes later because he realized he is not a dancer. He enjoyed working with Schuh, who was very patient with him throughout the process, and they compromised on the dance selection.
“I just couldn’t have worked with a better bunch of people,” he said, recognizing that the participants made a toast before anybody had danced and he told them it was phenomenal to be part of a dance competition with several new and old friends.
Craig, the farmer who danced in the trio, had his daughter-in-law as one of his partners. He noted that his partners surprised him at the rehearsal with a bit of a birthday number, and then he was surprised again on Saturday night when his wife, Shannon, joined the trio on the dance floor.
He noted that it was a challenge to find the time to practice due to a late harvest, so he crammed in the days leading up to the event. He was asked by Jennifer, a dancer, in September to dance and when she heard it was on his birthday, she told him, ‘perfect.’
“I had a ton of fun and you can’t have a better 60th birthday than that,” Craig said, adding that he was happy to participate and it was special for him to be part of a fundraiser for his home community. “I’ll remember that forever.”
Becker, one host, stated after the event that the Eatonia Centennial Committee is very grateful to those who supported the event by voting for contestants or buying tickets to attend, and “we want to bring this event back for another year and hope that people continue to support it.”
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