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R/£ Cleo's sad moment as dancer prevails
November 11, 2009 Edition 2
Lara de Matos
It's harsh. It's uncompromising. And it will probably draw cries of disapproval from her big contingent of supporters.
But the fact remains, the pigtailed Vereeniging girl favoured to win SA's Got Talent from the outset doesn't deserve to take home the title.
While Cleo Filander, 8, awed the audience and judges during her audition round, her rendition of Whitney Houston's One Moment in Time last night was less than stellar.
The fact that she made the cut for tomorrow's finale ahead of percussion prodigy Daniel Petersen, 6, cast the first shadow on the show's ultimate outcome.
The saving grace came in the form of Durbanite Darren Rajbal, 19, who again proved why being deaf has not deterred him from becoming a brilliant hip-hop dancer.
"I want to let everyone out there know that deaf people aren't lower than hearing people; they can also do anything," Rajbal told the crowd through a sign-language interpreter.
Other notable performances included that of ventriloquist Adino Trapani, 13. Clearly, Ian von Memerty's comment that "when you watch something being done this superbly, it's easy to forget the level of expertise that goes into it..." proved prophetic for the Joburg teenager.
While the second live show was certainly superior on the performance front than its Monday night predecessor, the event was marred by incessant shouting from the in-house crowd, which often made the acts difficult to follow.
A brief glitch which saw some of the numbers pertaining to the respective acts jump out of sync will undoubtedly draw cries of foul play from some supporters.
However, the problem was quickly corrected and the voting period extended to a further eight minutes to ensure that all votes would be accurately tallied.
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