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Crimson Dance Team at NDACC

From April 4—8 the Crimson Dance Team (CDT) attended the National Dance Alliance Collegiate Championship held in Daytona Beach, Florida. The team made it to the final round of competition for the first time and ended up placing 5th in the nation. Over seventy colleges from across the nation attended the competition, and the team competed with twenty-two other schools that qualified for Nationals in its division (Division I). CDT performed a piece called "No Strings Attached," one they had performed in the Office for the Arts Dance Program’s March concert, "Dancers’ Viewpointe." While members of the team selected the music and costumes for the routine, the piece was choreographed by New York City-based choreographer Elizabeth Piccoli in collaboration with team captain Kimberlee Garris (’01). Stephanie Troisi, program associate at the Office for the Arts, talked with Kimbelee Garris about the competition.

ST: What is the history of the Crimson Dance Team? KG: Roxanne Pan ’96 and Azucena Verdin ’98 founded the Crimson Dance Team in the spring of 1995 to provide Harvard dancers with the opportunity to practice and perform at a consistently intense level. The team is considered a club sport, currently made up of twelve female dancers who devote at least twelve hours a week to rehearsing, working out, and taking dance class together. The group combines elements of jazz, ballet, funk, and hip-hop in its exciting and athletically demanding routines. Most of the team members trained extensively in ballet and jazz before attending Harvard, but some dancers also have backgrounds in gymnastics, cheerleading, and musical theater. Over forty dancers auditioned for the team this year and four new members were selected.

How often do you perform and rehearse? Throughout the year, the Crimson Dance Team prepares for over thirty performances in the Harvard community. In addition, each member devotes countless hours towards fundraising for the team.

Are you a financially self-supporting group? Yes, and since the group is entirely student-run, raising enough money to fly twelve women to a five-day competition and to pay for costumes, choreography, and music editing is no easy feat! This year, for the first time, we were able to raise enough money to pay for a professional choreographer to assist us with our Nationals routine. Our next goal is to raise enough money to pay for a coach. We are one of the few teams in the various divisions that attend national competitions without a coach, and we are the only team ranked in the top ten without such assistance. While the Crimson Dance Team has achieved great success as a student-run organization, we feel that acquiring a coach is necessary to take our dancing to the next level.

What were the CDT’s goals in entering the competition? This year was the fifth time Harvard, represented by the Crimson Dance Team, attended the Collegiate Championship. We have never made it past the preliminary round of competition. Each year the goal has been to rank among the top ten teams in Preliminaries and to advance to the Finals. For this reason, we were ecstatic after a score of 8.58 (out of 10) put us in 7th place in the Prelims. This intensified our determination to make it to the Finals and rank among the top five teams in the nation. In Finals we received a score of 9.13! Harvard had the largest gain in score of any team, and this increase was enough to move us up to 5th place. The team was thrilled just to get the chance to dance with the top ten teams in the nation, but placing 5th made all of those hours of training even more rewarding. In addition, five of the team’s nine alumni were there to share this incredible experience with the dancers. Since the Crimson Dance Team was founded with the goal of making it to Finals, the alumnae said they were just as nervous as the dancers when the team took the stage. Harvard was the only newcomer in the final round, and the team’s performance really won over the crowd of thousands–which may have had an impact on the judges’ scores.

How did you prepare and train for this event? The Crimson Dance Team has been rehearsing eight hours a week since September. In addition, we work out together two times a week and take Dance Program Instructor Jeff Shade’s jazz class each week as a team. We stayed at Harvard over Spring Break for a week of intensive training to prepare for the Collegiate Championship, rehearsing six hours each day, sharing team dinners, and meeting every night to get mentally prepared for the competition.

How is CDT looking at the future? The team looks forward to watching the highlights from the Collegiate Championship on CBS on April 28th and the entire competition on USA at a later date. We are also busy preparing for our annual spring concert in Lowell Lecture Hall on May 5th and 6th at 8 pm. This concert, "Johnny’s Angels," will feature our Nationals routine, as well as new works in various styles of dance, which include ballet, jazz, tap, lyrical, and hip-hop.

Dance Program Director Elizabeth Bergmann was thrilled with the outcome of the competition. "We ranked right behind the teams that are always fighting for first and have large budgets for costumes and choreography and all their dancers on scholarship. I want to share this exciting news, because Harvard dance was really the talk of the competition down there!"