Sophomore Auzhy Cruz-Rodriguez a Greeley West student who spends her free time dancing for Top Notch Dance Company downtown in hopes of becoming a dancer in her future.
Cruz has been dancing for Top Notch since April of this year, and it is something she is very passionate about. Cruz’s family has been helping teach kids how to dance since she was young, so it has always been something she was open to and familiar. Cruz believes that dancing is as beneficial as it is fun: ”It keeps me active and is something I can do outside of school,” Cruz said. “It’s very fun and entertaining.”
As much as Cruz enjoys dancing itself, it is something she enjoys because she is familiar with most of the other dancers and has made friends with almost everyone in her company. Her company has mini groups that practice separately, but when they all come together, there are 60 kids combined dancing together. Cruz used to be able to participate in Hip Hop Madness, a yearly hip-hop event in Greeley, but now the company only hosts shows every year. Cruz has practice every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 8-9 p.m.
When asked about the pros and cons of dancing three days out of the week at a late time, Cruz stated,” It takes a lot of time and also is very hard to stay on schedule with it because it is so hard physically, but it also is keeping me in shape and it’s very fun.”
Although Cruz practices late at night, the majority of the time she does not find it difficult to juggle school work and maintaining dance. “I have dance sometimes 6 or later at night, so before I have dance right after school, I do my homework and try to finish everything before dance,” Cruz said.
Dance isnt always as easy for Cruz as there are still moves that she struggles with like flips and perfecting the precision behind routines. “I think the hardest moves I can do is, in one of our dances, we have to jump and turn around and do flips so flips and jumps so it has to be high, but it’s very hard to be up there after having such a hard dance, so it’s already tiring enough. We are already drained from the dance.” Cruz stated.
