It’s that time of year again! We welcome all prepas to our amazing university, each with their own unique charms: different sizes, majors, and also of different talents. It has been a year since the UPRM Dance Team held auditions and among the newest additions to the team, a fresh-faced “prepita” stands out. An Agricultural Sciences major, Karla Ortiz has been a dancer since she was six years old. She started taking ballet classes five years ago with Nana and Mumy Badrena at Western Ballet Theatre; this is where I first met Karla, as we were both dancers for the same company. She now dances at the dance school Ballet Escenario. After spending some time meditating upon the possibility of hanging up her pointe shoes, she discovered that dance “is in my blood and one of the most genuine and pretty things I can do.” Other than dancing, Karla also enjoys acting and playing other sports.
Upon auditioning for the Dance Team, she was nervous but also very determined. Now that she made it through the excitement of representing her University, the opportunity to give what’s best of her reigns high. Karla has big hopes for this new chapter: “I hope that along with the team, we can let the world know all the talent every dancer in the team has and I can enjoy every single activity, and always give my best.” Karla, always with a smile on her face, looks up to a trio of women because of their advice and the strength within them: Lourdes Ortega, Tatiana Rodríguez and Yamillette Padilla, who are her idols and her strongest inspirations.
Nevertheless, Karla isn’t the only one who qualified for the team this year. Gabriela Maldonado, a sophomore Biology major, started dancing jazz and hip hop at the OJ Dance Studio and leapt to Classic Dance Complex two years ago, where she currently trains in ballet and modern dance. It was in this second studio where she discovered dance as her passion: one day, she came out of her ballet and modern dance classes utterly exhausted with aches and pains, but with a feeling of satisfaction and happiness that made her believe “yup, I love this.” This realization was also thanks to the person she admires the most, Israel Coraliz, her dance teacher, who introduced her to ballet and modern dance, and awoke Gabriela’s “insatiable passion for dance.”
However, Gabriela doesn’t skip a beat, she also models and, this summer, participated in Miss Universe Puerto Rico, where she won first runner-up for Cabo Rojo. She says she felt a similar excitement stepping up to the Dance Team’s audition. “Minutes before the audition the only things I felt was a barbaric excitement and stress,” Gabriela expressed, “but I have trained very hard during my first year at Colegio and I knew I was well prepared.” As the audition wore on, “the suspense of who stayed and who didn’t had my heart ‘a millón’.” When she knew that she made it into the team, glee overwhelmed her because finally she made one of her dreams come true and, to this day, she can’t quite believe she’s part of the team. Nowadays, while Gabriela is anxiously awaiting the time to represent UPRM at “Las Justas,” she enjoys all the training and spends her study-time doing stretching exercises, apart from reading and watching TV series [don’t we all]. Both girls are spending their last few days of Summer training and getting ready for the intense and exciting adventure that is the Dance Team!