Word: ballrooms
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There is no “competitive dance” tab on the Harvard University Athletics website home page. Click around a little, though, and you’ll eventually find the Crimson Dance Team (CDT) and the Harvard Ballroom Dance Team (HBDT) listed among the club sports—along with figure skating, capoeira, and Harvard’s own Quidditch team...
...supported by the Office for the Arts at Harvard. Their craft involves rules, competition, intense training, self-control, and teamwork—like many other sports—while also allowing for self-expression on a more sophisticated level than pure competitive drive. The Crimson Dance Team and Harvard Ballroom Dance Team fuse athletic competition with artistic interpretation, in a unique hybrid of art and sport...
While dance groups abound at Harvard, only HBDT and CDT focus on competition. Harvard Ballroom began in 1990 to fill a gap in the dance community. “Our mission is to spread the art of ballroom dancing in a social and competitive way,” says Marco F. Perez-Moreno ’11, president of HBDT...
...Ballroom, too, depends on ballet for its foundation—but the former diverges from the latter in one critical way: the relationship to the floor. Ballet dancers stay lifted up off the floor, making minimal contact with it and absorbing any impact into the muscles so the moves remain graceful and quiet. Ballroom dancers strive for the exact opposite: they push their weight down into their muscles and make contact with the floor. Still, both depend on graceful elevated arms for the entirety of the dance, which means strong shoulder muscles are essential...
...Since ballroom competitions can have up to 20 couples on the floor at one time, the syllabus ensures a safe environment. “If you have people who are lifting their partners, it could get dangerous very fast,” says Madison J. Shelton ’11, the HBDT competitions chair. The first HBDT rehearsals of any given year involve around 200 members on a small floor, so tricky moves like lifts are not only prohibited, but impossible...