by Paige Hollendonner / 8CA Dance Writer

Throughout my high school dance career at Hinsdale South, I was trained to kick my leg straight up by my head, and to hold that pom motion as stiff as possible. Making sure that each movement was clean and precise, something I had grown to love and execute without even thinking about it. This led to state champion titles, immense core strength, and conditioning like no other. This was the life of being on a poms team, and I loved it. Being on a poms team you never hear the terms “loosen up” or “groove with it,” but these would soon be terms that would be as common in my vocabulary as “pirouette.”

​I have always loved dance and that love for dance did not leave me when I left for college. I knew I wanted to continue and expand my dance portfolio, but I also wanted to try something new. I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone. Therefore, I tried out for my college’s Hip-Hop Dance Team. The only Hip-Hop experience I had was coming from my past four years at UDA summer camp, so nonetheless I had no Hip-Hop experience whatsoever. To my surprise, I walked into the tryout with some UDA-inspired choreo and I made the Illuzions Dance Team at Carthage. I was extremely excited, but I could have never expected the whirlwind of our first practice and how unprepared I was to not be a poms dancer anymore.

I’ve got to thank Coach Bouton for letting us go behind the scenes and discover how this upper-crust hip hop team gets it done!

​Walking in to my first day of practice I expected an intense three hours full of stretching, cardio, repetitions, everything that I had done for the past four years at poms practice. Hip Hop practice was a whole new kind of intense, but our practice only lasted about an hour; something that I was not used to. In only one hour though, Coach Buzzy accomplishes a lot. He makes sure we are warmed up, conditioned, and then we jump straight into the choreo for the day. Even with only two hours of practice a week, our team pulls out phenomenal original routines that we perform at basketball games and other school events.

To give you a step-by-step of what a college Hip Hop team practice looks like, we start the practice with some cardio and then jump into new movements and isolations that we practice before Coach Buzzy throws them into our routines. He makes sure that everyone on the team has mastered the movement before going on to put it in the choreo. Let me tell you that these simplistic looking movements took this poms dancer months to master. I really did have him “teach me how to dougie.” Having “SHARPER” and “CLEAN IT UP” ingrained into my brain, being told to “groove” was a foreign concept for me. Eventually I found my “groove” and left some of my pom criteria at the door, but do not let the term “groove” fool you into thinking that Hip Hop does not need to be clean. The moves that need to be “grooved” through, still need to have an element of sharpness so that our whole team still dances in unison.

​Hip Hop creates this new world of “grooving” and having fun with your movements, while simultaneously making sure that your movements are still hitting the counts and making a clean and cohesive routine. Everyone gets to add their own little “spice” to the routine by “grooving” in their own personal manner. With pom routines there are choreographed facials, precise turn sequences, so there is never any “grooving” manner. But this is just one of the ways that makes Hip Hop and Pom so different, yet so similar in the same way. Each form of dance has its own importance, but at the end of the day both forms are meant to be a fun and entertaining way to make a crowd stand on their feet.

Besides dancing on the Illuzion Dance Team at Carthage and being a proud alum of the Hinsdale South Hornet Danceline, Paige is an awesome part of our 8CA team! Follow her on Twitter for expert commentary during competition season (@8caPaige).