A new club was added to DePaul College Prep, the Dance Club. This club has been created this year by senior Brennan O’Connell-Miller and Physical Education teacher Shannon McCarthy, who have high hopes to bring the dance community together at DePaul Prep. The Dance Club also collaborated with the theater department to choreograph the fall play.

O’Connell-Miller is on the dance team, and helped with the choreography in the fall play, The Learned Ladies of Park Avenue. O’Connell-Miller has said she has had this idea for a dance team since she was a freshman.

“I have been doing dance since I was little so I started talking to some of my friends to try and find a way to bring dance to DePaul,” she said.

O’Connell-Miller also said that the dance team is a great way to bring the dance community together at DePaul College Prep. O’Connell-Miller said, “Everyone on the dance team dances outside of school and has their own personal connection to dance.”

O’Connell-Miller said that this personal connection adds to the community of dance at DePaul Prep which builds the dance team to be stronger and more connected.

McCarthy, the club moderator, said that “there is an overall sense of commitment and a united front to come together and collaborate and create some beautiful dances for the performance.”

When O’Connell-Miller was asked about the choreography in the play, she said that McCarthy reached out to her and asked her to help. She said that she was very excited to help and use her years of dance experience to contribute to the choreography.

“Ms. McCarthy reached out to me and we had a meeting going over choreography and bouncing ideas off of each other,” O’Connell-Miller said.

The way the choreography is made is a multi-step process. McCarthy was sent the music in the play and the kind of choreography that was needed. O’Connell-Miller said the play is based in the 1920’s, so research was needed to make sure the choreography matched with the theme of the play. After that, the choreography was planned and tested out by McCarthy and O’Connell-Miller.

“There is a lot of partner dancing in the play, so we danced the choreography to make sure it would fit in the play,” O’Connell-Miller stated.

McCarthy said her overall goal with the club was “to curate a dance show. That would be our showcase, which will be performed on May 1st.”

“So far, we have contemporary ballet, and there is a hip hop number and a modern number,” said McCarthy. She also mentioned that the club is going to have some sort of involvement in the spring fling spring prep assembly later this year.

McCarthy said that she would like to have more performances and become a dance team. She said, “There’s a hope or a chance that in the future, we would switch gears and we would become a dance team, which would no longer be a fine arts experience, but it would be more of a competitive dance experience.”

According to McCarthy, the process of transitioning from a club to a dance team would “be a huge undertaking” and cause Dance Club to “switch from student activities to athletics.”

Aurelia Sebastian, a junior at DePaul Prep, is a member of the dance club. She has been dancing for fifteen years and has a lot of background experience in dance. The reason she joined the dance club was because she “wanted to participate in a school club doing something [she] already love[s] to do and meet other people in different grades.”

Sebastian said the dance club is a very good experience that she loves. Sebastian loves seeing the mix of students with a passion for dance. She said, “Everyone shares a love for dance and everyone understands we have dance related commitments outside of school.”

Overall the new dance club is a success in bringing awareness and the dance community at DePaul College Prep together.