Every year, student dancers march onto Parsons Field in coordinated outfits to dance away Powerpuff’s halftime. A culmination of three months of practice and muscle memory takes over the dancers’ movements.
The Cantico Club is a hip-hop and contemporary dance club that performs at events such as Powerpuff. The club organizes the event performances, from the choreography to the song mash-ups.
Dance teacher Mayra Hernandez advises Cantico and other dance clubs. Hernandez said dancing can be for anybody wanting to be active.
“Whether you’ve danced for years or you are brand new, [Cantico] is an opportunity to get to know some movement,” Hernandez said.
Senior and captain Rena Branover has been dancing for 14 years. She hasn’t always practiced hip hop and contemporary, the main styles of Cantico, but over the years, Branover said she has found her place on the team.
“[Cantico] is just a really fun group of people that like to dance together,” Branover said.
According to Branover, the team became much smaller this year.
“Last year, a bunch of seniors graduated, nearly a third of our team. So this year, we were looking to grab new talent and put it into our group,” Branover said.
Senior captains Branover, Noa Kitov, Morgan Grace and Kesiah Nwosu are responsible for managing the club and independently creating the musical set lists and choreography. According to Kitov, the club offers a level of freedom of self-expression not found on other official school dance teams.
“We have the freedom to choreograph everything, and we get to choose what we do,” Kitov said. “I like that Cantico is student-run. It feels like a community.”
Branover said they discussed making Cantico a team to grant them more competitive opportunities, but the captains generally enjoy the level of liberty the club title gives them.
“I think that aspect of it being a student-run, non-official dance team gives people a lot more freedom to go outside of dance because we also have a lot of girls in our group that do dance outside of Cantico,” Branover said. “If we were to make it a team and have practices every single day, it would be difficult for everybody to commit to it in the way they do now.”
Hernandez said that by becoming a team, Cantico could reach more communities within the school to find more exposure and opportunities.
“The choreography is lively. It takes you on a journey. It makes you excited to dance. The more that we can have dance be visible at the high school, I think the better it would be for the dance department as well as the performing arts department,” Hernandez said.
According to Hernandez, anybody can derive discipline from dance lessons.
“The lessons that you learn through dance can mimic the lessons that you want to apply to your everyday life, like persistence and dedication,” Hernandez said. “Even if you’ve never danced before. Perfection is never actually reached, but you reach closer to it with practice.”
Hernandez encourages getting involved in the dance community or a dance class, whether you’ve danced your whole life or never before.
“Through Cantico, you can create your own artistic voice and vision,” Hernandez said. “But most importantly, you get out of your comfort zone.”
