By Skylar Mullin

As halftime arrived during the University of Maryland’s football game against Virginia Tech on Saturday, Sept. 19, the members of the Pa’Lante dance team were on the sidelines, dancing out their nerves.

Paola Jackson, captain of the Pa’Lante’s Ladies team, stood on the field, looked out into the crowd and couldn’t see a single empty seat.

Pa’Lante, a student run Latin dance organization at UMD who promote Latin dance through performances in the community, is composed of three teams: Passos, a beginner-friendly team focused on partner work; Performance, an intermediate-to-advanced level partner work; and Ladies, which is all women and focused on styling and footwork without a partner.

In July, Jackson said the Ladies team learned about the opportunity to perform during the Hispanic Heritage Night game. But since there was no way to get together over the summer, she said rehearsals didn’t start until the school year began, giving them just under three weeks to perfect their routine.

Since the Ladies team is relatively small, Jackson said they wanted to bring in more dancers to the performance. Through a connection with a Jeison Flores, who helps run the dance team at Albert Einstein High School, Pa’Lante invited their dance team Titanes Salseros to join them.

The teams practiced together, commuting roughly 30 to 45 minutes to Montgomery County a few times before the performance, according to Tatiana Prada.

Prada, a sophomore psychology and marketing major who joined Pa’Lante during her freshman year, said scheduling and learning choreography quickly were the biggest challenges the group faced.

A lot of the time, Prada said the practices were putting together last minute people and ideas. She said they only got together for a full rehearsal two days before the performance.

Leila Cornejo, a senior who has been a part of Pa’Lante for four years, said though exciting, practice took up hours of her everyday life.

“The event was like my entire life for a little bit,” Cornejo said.

Cornejo helped Jackson with the choreography and helped the rest of the executive board lead practices, trying to make the performance as cohesive as possible.

The day of the performance, the team had only practiced with the Mighty Sound of Maryland marching band twice before taking the field.

“The stands were packed because it was the Virginia Tech game,” Prada said. “The lights were super bright. Everyone was shaking, nervous.”

Then the music started. For all three dancers, the performance itself passed in a blur, muscle memory taking over. 

At the end of the dance, members of Pa’Lante held up flags representing their respective Latin American countries.

Jackson, who had the Venezuelan flag, said the display made her feel connected to her heritage and feel seen.

“I was so prideful,” Jackson said. “Just being grateful for my ethnicity and where I come from.”

Cornejo said the performance was one of the biggest opportunities Pa’Lante had gotten to represent the Latin American community on campus. She said this performance was a defining memory for her senior year, especially as friends and family came out to support her.

Cornejo is already thinking about the DC Capitol Congress, a weekend-long salsa event full of performances and workshops.

Jackson said after the start of a great season through the halftime show performance, she hopes the team is able to have more performances just like it.

“It was a whirlwind of hours upon hours of practice,” Jackson said. “But it was honestly worth it in the end because of everyone coming together and being able to have fun on the field.”

Featured Image: Pa’Lante’s Ladies team danced during rehearsals for the University of Maryland football halftime show. Photo by Stella Henretta.