Leaps and Bounds: Princeton Dancer Athletes mix art and sport

“I think any triple jumper will tell you that triple jump is a dance when you think about it,” Imani Oliver ’14 said of her experience integrating dance with athletics. “The timing has to be right; there’s no music, but there is a way that it should sound when you’re landing on the ground.”

Oliver is one of the few student-athletes who decide to complement their hectic training schedules by exposing themselves to new perspectives on movement when they join one of the dance companies on campus.

Street tracked down four such athletes from two different dance groups on campus to chat about juggling dance with athletics. While they spoke of their passions for both and the family each group provides them, they all had a unique understanding of motion and team dynamics from their experience reconciling explosive athletic movements with dance and handling the shifting relationships between teammates on the field and in the studio.

Movement

“As a running back, there’s a lot of footwork involved. You have to be very light on your feet and very adept at changing directions quickly, laterally, forward or backward,” Brian Mills ’14, a member of the football team and BAC, explained. “It actually correlates well with dance because in hip hop dancing, or any form of dance for that matter, your feet are a huge part of what you do. You have to be able to move and be explosive at times and tone it down at others. In that sense, they’re quite similar. I mean, the motions are different, but the basics of what you have to train yourself to do are interchangeable.”

While each athlete agreed the movement itself was quite different, most attested to the similar progression of skills necessary to improve in both disciplines.

“In each piece there’s a certain style that you want to catch. When you’re practicing that style, the movements become easier,” Oliver said of her choreography experience. “That’s like triple jump; you try to practice a certain style. I think it’s getting a feeling for something that’s very similar, more so than the actual movements.”

Despite the focus on perfecting certain styles during practice and rehearsals, the athletes added that the mentality during each tends to be completely different because the years of experience training the repeated motions of their sport leads to an innate muscle memory absent in the changing movements of dance.

“When you’re actually performing the movements, you’re thinking about completely different things,” Mark O’Connell ’14 noted in comparing his time in diSiac with his collegiate diving career. “In dance, when you move a part of your body, you are thinking about every single time you move an arm or a leg. Whereas in diving, a lot of the movement is muscle memory. Your body just knows what to do.”

Relationships

Although years of training give the athletes a muscle memory for their sports that can’t be expected of the constantly changing movements of dance, practices also differ from rehearsals because of the informal, collaborative dynamic of student-run groups.

“When I come to dance practice, we’re all peers. It’s fun in a much more fluid and free environment,” Mills explained. “When I go to football practice, it’s fun, but it’s fun in a different way. It’s fun in a very focused, explosive way."

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Practices don’t just differ from rehearsals in their more formal focus, but also in the distinction between each athlete’s structured relationship with his coach and the more casual relationship with peer choreographers.

"I don’t think there’s a good way of comparing the coaches to the choreographers. They’re just completely different beasts,” Byron Sanborn ’16 explained of one of the fundamental differences between his time on the swim team and in diSiac rehearsals. “They’re very different relationships because all of the choreographers are my peers and my friends."

Others echoed the sentiment and attested to the almost familial relationship athletes can develop with their coaches after spending years training with them.

“With dancing, we’re a student-run group, so we’re taught by each other and we can help each other,” O’Connell said. “That is true of diving to an extent, but our coach is the primary person we refer to. Personally, I really like diving with a coach. I trust him, and he is part of my diving.”

The experience of rotating student choreographers seemed to most closely mirror the presence of team captains, peers who are there to lead and inspire the group but are not absolute authority figures.

Dynamics

Every athlete thought the different structures of the two groups fit the different goals of each. The intense, personalized focus of a team of constant coaches in athletics pushed them to perfect their technique, while the changing visions of rotating artistic directors in dance companies introduced them to innovative new perspectives.

“Having rotating directors, you get a chance to bond with people in different ways. So I’ve been in pieces choreographed by a lot of people, and now I’m directing them, and there’s no power complex with that. Everyone is equal, everyone can choreograph, everyone is in one piece,” Oliver added. “I think it works for the different settings. In one setting, you need championships. In the other, you’re doing it for exhibition. You want something to have a fresh look every year.”

However, dancers on campus spend only about 12 hours rehearsing with their choreographers before performing the pieces. The relationships students develop with the choreographer as a leader can be superficial and focus more on maintaining friendships — a concern coaches don’t have with their athletes.

“I do think it can be awkward if one person in a dance is doing something incorrectly. Choreographers may make the entire group run through a section, when they’re really trying to point to one person,” O’Connell explained. “In terms of individual attention, it is very useful to have the structured coach-athlete relationship.”

Crossover

Every athlete agreed that dancing had improved their athletic performance, either directly, through training muscles they have trouble working through traditional practices, or indirectly, by improving their bodily awareness.

“I definitely think they help contribute to each other in ways that I probably haven’t even noticed. For instance, I feel that dance has helped me understand a lot more bodily control,” Mills said. “On the football field, that translates when I’m trying to avoid a tackle. I understand where my body needs space relative to somebody else or relative to other parts of my own body at the same time. Doing just football, you don’t really think about that. You have pads on, you bounce off of somebody, it doesn’t matter.”

Further, all of the athletes saw dance as a form of sport, deviating from the focus on strength of traditional athletics but still demanding power.

“By the end of a piece, I feel just as tired sometimes. It’s a kind of stamina, being able to get through a piece in the same way you get through a competition, but I will say that triple jumping is just a little harder,” Oliver quipped.

Despite the intense time commitment needed to participate in both groups and the physical demands of each, most of the student-athletes would never think about dropping either.

“I would never quit. I would rather fail a class,” O’Connell joked.