Magazine Features Dancers

Okay, Yale beat us in football and our showing in the Beanpot wasn't, stellar. But at least one Harvard team is on top of things. Its members need strength, conditioning and a polished wood floor, but they prefer the foxtrot and the samba to layups and three pointers--the Harvard-Radcliffe Ballroom Dancing team.

An article in this month's issue of Boston Magazine publicizes the little-known success of the Harvard-Radcliffe Ballroom Dance Club's (HRBDC) competitive team.

The Boston Magazine feature assigns the HRBDC team first place (above teams from Yale, MIT and Boston University) in the area ballroom dancing "pecking order." But members say they're the best team nationally.

"We're basically number one," said Alex M. Fung '98, who is featured in the magazine's article.

The dancers said they might be upstaged by Brigham-Young University, which, according to Hurtada, offers a ballroom dancing major, but they do not compete on the college circuit and thus do not enter into the national ranking.

"They'd kick our butts," Elizabeth M. Pine '97, the Club's Vice-President, said.

The Dance Club, founded just six years ago, is working to ensure it doesn't fall from the number one spot. The club currently has about 150 members, 50 to 60 of whom dance competitively, Pine said.

According to Fung, the club draws most of its members from free lessons offered twice a week at the MAC.

"They just come because they're interested," Fung said. "If they get hooked onto it they take more classes."

Jaime Hurtada '96 and his dancing partner, Lara Izlan '97, both said their ballroom dancing careers began with the free classes.

"I started taking the MAC classes last year, and then I got hooked," Hurtada said.

Izlan said she had done some dancing before coming to Harvard, though never ballroom dancing, which she said is not popular in Malaysia, her native country. When she started taking dance classes as a first year student, she thought ballroom dancing would be "an interesting thing to bring back home," Izlan said.

HRBDC's team displayed its prowess this weekend at a competition in New York, which Hurtada said was "about as good as a competition gets." Hurtada said HRBDC's team won first place in two categories and second in another.

Izlan said she and Hurtada, who won a dance scholarship at this year's competition, first competed together at this same event last year. "It was a year anniversary of sorts," she said.

The team was also extremely successful at the Fourth Invitational Competition, held at Harvard's Cronkhite Graduate Center on February 4.

"Harvard cleaned up," Pine said. "We won almost every event and we won the team match by a landslide, as always."

Fung and his sister and dancing partner Jennifer M. Fung '97, won the International Style Standard division of the February competition. Fung said he was happier about the Harvard-Radcliffe team's overall success than about this personal victory, though.

"It's always nice because it is [Harvard's] competition and we put it on and we danced really hard and we won," he said.

Team members said ballroom dancing can be as valuable for those who do it recreationally as it is for its most intense competitors.

"I think a lot of people could get a lot out of it at least socially if not competitively," Izlan said.

"It's something you can't do by yourself," Pine said. "One person dancing isn't ballroom."