Senior builds on dance passion by choreographing for Homecoming

Choreographing dances is harder than it might look. Just convincing everyone to attend practices is difficult enough, let alone transforming a couch-potato set of students with little or no dance experience into a coordinated dance group.

Still, senior Joy Tang faced this challenge again this year, as she has for the past three Octobers.

“Every year after Homecoming, starting from sophomore year, I've received compliments from people who enjoyed my dance,” Tang said “So there's always additional pressure to live up to the expectations [with each following year].”

In addition to the usual troubles that Homecoming brings (uncooperative dancers, no dancers, perhaps even terrible dancers), Tang had to choreograph with an ankle injury this year. Tang sprained her right ankle over the summer and then irritated the ligaments earlier in the school year. 

“[My initial thought when I injured my ankle again was], ‘Oh great, not again. I swear it's broken. Can't dance again… What's new?’” Tang said. “It's really painful to watch people dance and not be able to dance yourself.”

With dance moves in time to the “Wizards of Waverly place” theme song, Tang’s choreography was a mammoth of a task, involving at least 10 hours of practice and four hours of planning in just October alone.

“I honestly just want the girls to have fun with the dance,” Tang said in the days before the event. “They've worked so hard and I want them to enjoy themselves. Of course I'd like the dance to be perfect, but anyone who's participated in dances knows that it's very very very difficult to organize everyone and make them listen.”

One of Tang’s goals was for the choreography to be “fun to do and fun to watch.”  The ultimate desire, though, was for her choreography to bring the class of 2015 together.

“I think it's like this in terms of difficulty for Homecoming every year,” Tang said. “But everyone really comes together to make Quad Day amazing. You can really feel the spirit and the unity within the class. Even though it's a pain to organize, the performance at the end is always worth it.”

After the performance, which extracted cheers and whoops from the onlookers, Tang was satisfied with the results.

“Aside from the technical difficulties, I think the performance went well,” Tang said. “We were all a bit nervous going into it, but once I saw the video of the dance, I knew all our hard work paid off.”