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...competes at the Universal Dance Association College Dance Team National Championships in Orlando, Florida, in addition to performing at men’s and women’s basketball games and exhibition shows. Their choreography mostly focuses on jazz and hip-hop, but they performed pom—a style of dancing similar to cheerleading—when they competed at the National Dance Alliance Championships in years past. Despite their practice of pom, CDT members insist that their craft differs from cheerleading in method...
...basic language: ballet. “You can’t walk until you crawl, and you can’t dance until you learn ballet. It’s the foundation of everything,” Szpak says. “The connection between ballet and dance team is like with the alphabet: once you have the letters down, you can make any word.” This dance alphabet leads to the diverse styles CDT performs, and just as with a spoken language, it’s easier to make the sounds if you’ve been...
Once the foundation is laid, the teams undergo a process akin to a visual artist picking and priming his tools as they prepare for competition. CDT first chooses a choreographer based on an intense selection process. “It involves watching more YouTube than you can imagine,” Prince says. The captains then suggest music and a theme to the choreographer, who comes back to the team with a set two-minute routine. Even so, the members sometimes tweak the piece to fit their vision and showcase their dancers’ strengths. A winning routine is often...
HBDT’s rehearsals culminate in the Harvard Invitational, an annual competition between as many as 50 schools at which the team showcases their talents. The competition lasts two full days, during which the four styles at all three levels are performed. Professional judges wander the dance floor looking at each couple for a short amount of time; each round, they cut half of the couples until finally selecting the highest scorers...
...same way, Szpak compares CDT to a track team: “Everybody is dancing on their own, but it only succeeds if they all move together—so in that way, it’s more cohesive than a sport. If someone in front of you moves, you have to move even if they’re wrong. It really is like we’re on a playing field together, working as a team,” she says...