“In dance, you really have to be patient and you have to be determined,” sophomore Sophia Moreno said. “Nothing comes easily and it will take time to get things right. You can’t just expect to do something perfectly on the first try, or to get it right all the time.”
Moreno, in addition to taking Advanced Modern Jazz and being a member of Cantico, a student-run dance group at the school, dances at Mass Motion Dance in Brighton.
According to Moreno, the challenges she faces in dance are not without their own benefits.
“I can work harder than I used to be able to,” she said.
Moreno practices jazz, modern, ballet, hip-hop and contemporary dance. Christien Polos, Moreno’s dance teacher at the school, said he appreciates working with a student both versatile and disciplined in her art form.
“To me, that means she comes in every day, she works really hard and she intellectually thinks about the material that I’m giving to her in class that may be very different from her experience prior,” he said.
Polos said Moreno constantly works to improve her dance technique.
“She’s got a drive to always get better,” he said. “‘So, you can do four turns. Well, now do five turns.’ ‘Oh, your leg can go this high. Well, if you stretch more, can you get it a little higher?’ It’s a never-ending growth, and I think that she’s comfortable taking on that challenge.”
Yet Moreno’s enthusiasm itself took years to develop. She started dance at age three but quit at seven.
“It’s really tough to spend so much time committed to something if you’re not fully invested in it,” Moreno said.
Moreno restarted dance at age nine, inspired by the costumes her sister, Ava Moreno ‘12, wore while dancing. Ava has danced since the age of two.
Moreno’s recent role in the Boston Liturgical Dance Ensemble’s Christmas Reflections, a show unrelated to the school or to Mass Motion Dance, stands as a testament to her longtime commitment.
As a child, Moreno annually saw A Dancer’s Christmas, a precursor to Christmas Reflections. Though she has participated in Christmas Reflections for the past four years, this year she took on her largest role yet.
“The part that I got was an angel,” she said. “I remember thinking when I was little that I always wanted to wear that angel costume.”
Moreno said that one dancer she worked with in Christmas Reflections showed her that dancers can work to overcome physical challenges to perform well.
Polos complimented Moreno’s own attitude regarding dance.
“You can tell she loves to dance,” he said. “It’s really different watching someone who takes a dance class because they think it would be fun or it fulfills a health and fitness requirement compared to somebody who walks in the door, is learning from you, and you can tell that they live it.”
According to Polos, Moreno looks at dance as a language.
“When Sophia is dancing, say if we’re doing a dance phrase, and I can look over and I see she’s what I would call ‘lost’ in it, meaning that her brain is really working to translate it as a language,” he said.
Approaching dance as a language allows Moreno to achieve an involvement in the material beyond the merely mechanical.
“It’s not just steps: ‘Oh, I’m going to learn these steps in an order.’ That’s sort of easy for her,” Polos said. “She can learn the steps fairly quickly because she has a large vocabulary, but I see her, she gets lost in the emotion of it, or the feel of the music, or how she translates it, and that’s another level of working.”
According to Moreno, her engagement in the language of dance allows her to unlock the beauty in unrelated subjects such as football.
“Instead of just seeing it as a game where people tackle each other and then get points, I can see the intricacies of it,” Moreno said. “I think I can appreciate it better because I could understand how the movement works and how tough that must be, because I know from experience—not from football, but from dance.”
Emmanuel D’Agostino can be contacted at [email protected]
