The 78-girl dance team, composed of Varsity and JV, is led by two seniors, Co-Colonels Devin Morris and Audery Cheng. As colonels, the two are responsible for cleaning all the dances, setting formations, picking outfits and figuring out which competitions the team goes to alongside Townsend.
“It has honestly been really good this year because we got a new director, and she’s definitely helped things run very smoothly,” Morris said, “It also helps having another colonel so that we can work together on things to make it less stressful.”
On top of the team dances, all dance officers perform their three officer routines — jazz, contemporary and lyrical — at competition as well as solos for the juniors. This year makes the biggest dance officer cohort, with seven officers.
“I’m really excited for our officer routines this year,” Morris said. “The lyrical was choreographed by our officers. It’s so much fun. Our contemporary was choreographed by Townsend which is really fun, because it was the first time we have really gotten to work with her closely. They’re all really hard, but I’m excited.”
Officer practices take place after school from 4 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. every day of the week. No one officer leads the practices, resulting in collaboration between various officers.
“It’s definitely a little hard being here from 7 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., but it’s honestly kind of enjoyable, and I feel really productive when we have officer practice because we get a lot done,” Morris said. “We all just talk at the same time, and we all try to figure stuff out. One of us will step out and look back at the dance. A lot of the time, it’s me or Cheng reviewing the dance, but it depends. Whenever Townsend comes in and helps us clean the dances, that’s when we’re the most productive, because we can all dance.”
Since the officers have been mostly focused on cleaning the team dances, the officer routines have been a little neglected, but Morris has faith in their performance.
“I’m a little nervous, but I know that everything will be okay,” Morris said. “It’s a little bit sentimental when it’s my last first competition of the season, and I have seven dances this year, so it’s just a lot, but I have a feeling it’ll be good. And it’s our first competition, so if things aren’t the way we want them, we still have two more competitions where we can tweak our dances.”
The hardest part of competition isn’t the dancing itself. Instead, keeping a “good” mindset throughout the day is one of Morris’s main challenges.
“It’s really hard, especially when you have a lot of dances back to back, to keep your strength, keep your stamina and still perform 100% full out all of the time,” Morris said. “When you have very technically difficult dances, sometimes your mind will freak you out right before you get on stage. The hardest part is the mental game because you know you can do the dance, but there’s always just stuff that happens to your brain on competition day that just makes you kind of feel crazy.”
Morris is performing seven dances at competition, with one of them being a contemporary duet with Cheng to the song “Love in the Dark” by Adele. This is Morris’s and Cheng’s eleventh year dancing together, and the dance was choreographed by Caitlin Hammock, a dancer on Texas A&M University’s dance team and close friend of Cheng’s older sister, making the dance even more “special” for the two of them.
“Audrey and I have been dancing together since we were five years old, since we had a Houston Ballet together,” Morris said. “We decided to do a duet my sophomore year and I think it’s going to be really fun because we’ve just danced together for so long, and we have a lot of the same training. So I’m really excited to do that with her.”
Many other Belles are also performing extra dances, since Belles must perform a solo in order to try out or re-tryout out for a dance officer position. Junior and Captain Ziah Newton decided to choreograph her own solo — a contemporary dance to the song “Lay me Down” by Sam Smith — something not many Belles do.
“My solo was a passion I developed because it’s dedicated to my mom, but also my uncle, since he passed, and that’s the reason why I do dance,” Newton said. “I decided to self choreograph my solo because I wanted to do dance moves that I know how to do, but also to challenge myself to learn new moves and actively go out on the floor and just choreograph.”
Each Belle goes through their own journey on the team, and for Morris, it involves becoming progressively less stressed about competition season every year.
“My freshman year, I was really scared, and I would practice every night at home,” Morris said. “I always wanted to impress the officers. I remember, in my freshman year kick, I was put in the dance next to the colonel at the time, and I was really scared. I would practice so much, and I would really stress myself out. Over the years, having a higher ranked position, it’s definitely a lot more relaxed, and I’m not as stressed out for competition anymore because I know everything’s gonna be okay. Competition at this point is not as scary for me as it is exciting.”
