Floating across the sand with crashing waves and the blue sky as a backdrop, Kimberly Cronin dances for a video camera at Will Rogers State Beach. Her choreographed three-minute dance, titled ‘Beauty Is Simplicity,’ won the state PTA Reflections contest in the dance category and was forwarded to the national level, where Cronin was one of three in her age group to receive an excellent award. The Reflections contest encourages artistic expression in six categories (photography, film production, dance, literature, music and visual arts) by students in kindergarten through high school. The contest starts at the school level with more than 500,000 entries, with winners advancing to district, state and national levels. Cronin, a senior at Palisades Charter High School, received $200, a silver-plated Reflections medallion, a certificate and recognition in the annual PTA Reflections online gallery. She had never participated in the contest, but her PaliHi dance teachers, Cheri and Monique Smith, told her she should enter. ‘They’ve been really inspirational and supportive, encouraging me to take [artistic] chances,’ Cronin says. ‘Cheri told me I should enter because there are not too many opportunities where people ask you to show your talents.’ After choosing the song ‘Comptine d’un autre ‘t’ by Yann Tiersen to dance to, Cronin asked a high school friend to videotape her. At the beach, she encountered a problem. ‘The noise from the waves and birds was so loud,’ she says, ‘I couldn’t hear the taped music. But I heard the music in my head and danced to it.’ Later, her brother Colin, who graduated from UCLA in December and was a drum major at PaliHi, added the music. Cronin, who has been in the PaliHi spring musical all four years, has the lead in this year’s ‘City of Angels,’ but now has a new problem: She fell at a college dance audition in March and tore several ligaments in her right foot while also fracturing several bones. ‘The bones have healed,’ says Cronin, who has been on crutches for several months. She graduated to a walking cast and one high heel in time for the senior prom on May 14. Hoping to be out of that cast before the musical opens on June 3, Cronin admits ‘It’s been hard watching my understudy in my role.’ Her character, Laura Kingsley, is supposed to be drop-dead gorgeous dame. The part, unfortunately, calls for high heels rather than crutches or casts. Since Cronin also participates in the PaliHi dance program, she faces yet another challenge: she may miss the spring dance recital on June 8. For an earlier assignment in dance class, she choreographed a piece that allowed her to do a dance sitting down, and she hopes she can do something similar for the recital. Cronin, who lives in Westchester, enrolled at Paul Revere as a sixth grader. ‘We went to the school for the music program,’ says Cronin, whose mother, Colleen, teaches music at a different elementary school every day of the week. Colleen knew that Revere’s music program was regarded as one of the best in the district and put her children in Revere’s lottery, where they won the right to attend the school. Cronin’s father, Patrick, is a contractor. Like many young girls, Cronin took her first dance class at a YMCA (in Westchester). When she was eight, her mother was asked to play piano for an upper-level ballet class. In exchange, Cronin was given lessons. ‘My mom eventually stopped playing, but by then I was hooked and kept dancing,’ says Cronin, who has taken ballet for 10 years. She now dances jazz, tap, lyrically, modern, hip-hop and West African. ‘I’m open to any styles and will explore any type of dance,’ says the vivacious teenager. ‘Ballet is where I developed my technique, and that makes it easy to adapt to another style.’ She has been accepted into the UCLA dance program, but says she might also look at physiology because she enjoys biology. ‘No matter what I do, I want to be dancing somehow,’ Cronin says. ‘Dancing on Broadway would be awesome, because you could also sing and act.’ To view Cronin’s dance, visit: www.ptareflections.org.
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