Dance Team Tops Video Challenge

Kirsten Dunst won’t be the only one “bringing it on” this season—the Crimson Dance Team shimmied, twirled and high kicked their way into first place in a national video competition, landing a subsidized trip to the Chick-fil-A Cheer and Dance Collegiate Championship in April.

The first-place ranking after the National Dance Alliance (NDA) College Nationals Video Entries competition marks the first top seeding in the team’s 10-year history.

While the Crimson scored just below rival Towson University, located near Baltimore, Md., on the video itself, Harvard received a bonus for attending an NDA dance camp this summer that boosted the team into first place, according to Kimberly M. Cheng ’06, one of the team’s two co-captains.

Unlike many of their rivals, the Crimson is not funded by Harvard’s athletics department, and the University does not recruit dancers or offer dance scholarships like Towson, Cheng said.

“Coming close to [Towson’s] score is flattering because we don’t have resources like they do,” Cheng said. “Two years ago, we made our own costumes because we were so poor.”

Harvard’s top finish means the NDA will pay for the team’s hotel rooms and subsidize part of their registration fees, saving the team thousands of dollars.

Cheng said she and her co-captain, Ann W. Brown ’05, hope to use those savings to hire a professional choreographer. While big state schools have long been able to afford professional choreographers to put together their routine for nationals, the Crimson has only been able to afford partial choreography. The co-captainschoreograph all of the routines performed at basketball games.

“Just having the bid opens so many doors,” said Thea A. Daniels ’05, a former captain. “We can have our choreography done by a professional, have our costumes made by a qualified seamstress instead of a team member, and focus on our dancing and what we need to do to actually win instead of the red tape behind actually getting to the competition.”

Each team at the national competition will perform a two-minute, 10-second routine featuring jazz and funk dance, as well as pom dance—cheering.

While the rest of the College parties and relaxes during spring break, the team will be training on campus during their self-dubbed “nationals boot camp.”

With the competition scheduled for the week after spring break, the team can’t afford to take nine days off, Cheng said. Despite the intensive lead-up, the team is optimistic about their potential at this year’s nationals, which will take place April 6 to 10 in Daytona Beach, Florida.

Cheng cites the talent level on the team as a main factor of their stellar results so far. The current 16-member team contains an eclectic range of dance backgrounds: Broadway, ballet, hip-hop, jazz and cheer.

The current team is off to a better start than last year’s team because the girls have bonded more, Daniels said.

“We had a wonderful team last year, but it was a clear divide between old and new members,” she said. “This year the team became one unit very quickly.”

In the last four years, the team has placed fourth, fifth, sixth and 12th at nationals. The current team contains many returning members, allowing the team to fill spots with only girls who had the best training, Cheng said.

“It’s the best team I’ve seen in my four years in terms of talent, willingness to work and cohesiveness,” Daniels said. “If it’s going to happen, this would be the year.”