Two new forms of garba now seem to be the latest festival trend in the city — salsa garba, aqua garba and aqua dandiya. For a fortnight now, these events are being organised in hotels and grounds in the city.
Salsa garba was started by Sunita Patel who held classes and workshops for a month in the city. Sidharth Dugar, a participant explained: “It’s a new form of dance where you have a mix of garba steps with a flavour of salsa. So, there is proper co-ordination required and learning these steps is very important.”
Salsa garba had a lot of takers — from college students to IT professionals in the city.
Meanwhile, aqua garba is a take off from aqua zumba, aqua yoga and other forms of water-based exercises.
Mandala Venu, an aqua dance instructor, who has been organising the aqua garba events in the city says, “I always used to come up with different themes for my aqua dance classes so I thought, why not try garba? I gave it a try myself first and it turned out to be quite a lot of fun. Later, I made a video out of it and put it up on Facebook and soon, I started getting enquiries about the details. I then organised two events and both were hits.”
Aqua garba needed a bit of tweaking though.
“We actually soaked the sticks in salt water so that the swimming pool’s water doesn’t get affected. For the second event, we even had a live band perform while the ladies tried out aqua garba,” says Venu.
Sonal Patel, a student of St Francis College for Women says: “Aqua garba was very exciting as we did the garba steps in the water. This requires a lot of energy and most of us were in our swimming costumes except the trinkets and the dandiyas. Those who didn’t want to do in the swimming pool, did traditional garba around the pool area in traditional clothes.”
Two events of aqua garba were held in the city in hotels where the participation fees ranged from Rs 600 to Rs1,000 per person.
