Dance Team delivered performances that secured top five in all categories at their annual West Coast Elite (WCE) Dance competition on Jan. 1, which was held on campus in the main school gym.
Dance Team competed in a variety of categories, including Kick, Small Pom, Small Hip-hop, Medium Lyrical, Small Lyrical and Medium Jazz. They earned Best Showmanship Champions and first place for Kick, along with top-five placements in all other categories.
“We’ve been training really hard the entire season so far, so we were pretty confident going into it, especially because we did pretty good in the last competition,” Dance Team vice president junior Sally Bai said.
WCE is a prominent dance competition circuit and convention organizer for school dance teams, highlighting dancers from middle and high schools all around the west coast. The competition was hosted on campus for two years now, featuring 15 schools. Various dancers represented their school in different styles of dance, each starting with an announcement and prep before getting into the dance.
“I feel like we could have done better. We were a little disappointed, but having a score of 91 and above for all our dances is still pretty good too,” Dance Team member freshman Evelynne Witjakso said.
Leading up to the competition, dancers put in countless hours of preparations to perfect their choreography. Practice is crucial for a dancer’s confidence as consistent preparation helps with memorizing the dance. During practice, the coaches record videos so dancers can watch themselves back and know what to fix. They give them corrections and run their dances based on those corrections a lot until they are ready to perform.
“We always just watch our film from whatever the most recent video competition practice was, and we take corrections from that, either from the judges or from our coaches,” Dance Team captain senior Savannah Huang said.
Before getting on stage, dancers stand in a circle and officers make a short speech to motivate the team. Since nerves are often high, this helps with boosting each performer’s self-esteem and self-assurance.
“Just the constant improvement from all of my teammates is crazy, [especially] because it’s my last year. [I’ve] gotten so close to them,” Huang said.
