Oct 10 2022
The Morningside Dance Team Includes Monte the Mustang in Most Recent Performance. – Article #2 Final
The new Monte Mustang made his debut with the Morningside Dance Team last Saturday during halftime of the homecoming football game.
Sophomore, Sina Diaz, was in charge of the choreography for this new dance. She didn’t originally volunteer because she is still an underclassmen and she felt that one of the upperclassmen would want to step up, but instead, her teammates egged her on and told her that she needed to do it.
The idea to bring Monte into this dance was brought to her attention by her dance coach, Erin Baker. Sina had plans of having someone perform a solo during the dance, so adding Monte to the mix worked out perfectly.
Diaz emphasized that the practices went very well. A lot of the dancers were down on themselves from the previous weeks, so having this fun dance really changed their mood and allowed them to have fun.
“Monte was surprisingly very easy to teach, he picked up the choreography really quick. Although he wasn’t swaggy at first, he definitely practiced because he came back and he knew what he was doing,” Diaz explained.
Diaz felt that the performance went really well. Lots of people came up to her and gave her great feedback saying that it looked like it was a lot of fun.
The hardest thing she had to battle was making the dance to fit everyones needs and to make sure Monte would mesh well with the rest of the dancers.
Monte the Mustang stated, “When I’m in the costume, my arms don’t bend and move the exact same, nor does my head, so it just takes a second to make a change so that it looks normal.”
Diaz’s teammate, Samantha Snyder, a junior all-conference dancer, really enjoyed dancing with Monte and changing it up. She was very confident in Sina’s ability to choreograph a hip hop dance that suited everyone needs.
“Obviously Monte has a lot of school spirit, and we do too as the Morningside University Dance Team, so we kind of shared the common interest of wanting to please all of our fans,” stated Snyder.
It wasn’t only the dance team that was pleased with their performance, the fans loved it too.
Carter Ades, a Morningside student who saw the performance at halftime, had nothing but good things to say about this performance.
He stated, “I thought it was impressive to see how well coordinated they were, they looked to be in mid-season form already, and the addition of Monte was fun and added to the performance.”
The Morningside University Dance team is now getting ready to tackle their upcoming competition season.