Dance republic

The bass dropped hard inside the Met, and for the briefest of hours, Manila felt like a satellite of Seoul.

"Everyone's KPOP: Battle of the Champions," staged by the Korean Cultural Center in the Philippines, pulled the country's thriving K-Pop cover dance scene into the spotlight, a subculture built on love for choreography that borders on athletic combat.

The setting mattered. Manila’s grand old theater, has hosted opera, politics and pageantry for nearly a century. On this night it hosted Filipino crews executing the hyper-precise grammar of K-pop performance.

Four finalists: Alpha, Meraki, Paradigm and Wildkard. When the smoke cleared, Paradigm walked away with the grand champion title.

Lia Kim, the globally known choreographer and co-founder of Seoul’s 1MILLION Dance Studio, evaluated the routines with the eye of someone who helped shape the K-pop dance language itself.

Gwyn Dorado, the Filipino singer who gained international attention on Korea’s television competition Sing Again 4, brought the vocalist’s perspective and later performed “Rebirth,” the Yoon Jong Shin classic. Ciel Oh, a veteran instructor and head of the Korean Cultural Center’s K-pop Academy in Manila, rounded out the panel.

The crowd got another jolt when Venisse Siy, the Tagalog-singing voice of Mira from the Grammy-winning K-pop Demon Hunters, stepped out to perform “Golden.”