A Dizzying Halftime Performer

The curved knives Lindsay M. Liles ’10 is brandishing glint in the wintry sunlight that streams into the common room of her Mather quint. She locks their hooked ends together, and for a moment it looks like she is going to swing them over her head in lethal, long-handled circles.

But then she puts the knives down. She wants to show off the thick sparkly ribbon she sewed in high school, as well as the sequined ballroom dance costume she just finished altering.

“I love glitter,” she says.

ALTER EGO

Liles is Harvard’s only baton twirler.

Her twisting, kicking, spinning routines have enlivened Harvard University Band’s halftime show every time the band has performed at a Crimson football game for the past two years.

At this year’s Harvard-Yale game, Liles played “Little Crimson Riding Hood.” She was eaten by the big bad Yale Bulldog—and then John Harvard saved the day.

Blockmate Tzu-Ying Chuang ’10 calls Liles’s performance persona “her alter ego.”

“Normally, she’s not the kind of person to go up and talk to people. On the field, she’s like a totally different person, like ‘look at me, look at me!’” said Chuang.

But the sprightly entertainer is an identity Liles is used to assuming. She began twirling at age nine, after trying out dance and gymnastics. Until coming to Harvard, she spent an hour each week with a private coach, perfecting her technique and learning to twirl as many as three batons, a pair of special twirling knives, and burning baton.

For the uninitiated, baton twirlers perform a coordinated routine that combines dance and gymnastics, while simultaneously tossing a weighted metal rod. Twirlers often perform with competitive marching bands, most popular at large state universities and high schools in the midwest and south.

Liles’ story began among the cow pastures of Rockdale, Texas. After she was admitted to Harvard, Liles, who lives in the rural Texan town, e-mailed the College’s band manager and volunteered to perform with the band. Her freshman year she had only four routines, which she mixed and matched to accompany the HUB’s fight songs.

But last summer, she turned up the volume, spending ten weeks with her coach back in Rockdale to craft routines that would perfectly align with the band’s full repertoire.

A DYING ART

Rockdale, where Liles grew up, is a small farming town about 70 miles northeast of Austin, the kind of place where life revolves around the town square and the football field. The chamber of commerce Web site prominently displays a photograph of reddish brown cattle standing placidly in a pasture.

During the three years she twirled with her high school marching band at games and pep rallies, Liles was a key component of the gridiron pageantry.

“Friday nights just had this energy to them, where it’s just infectious,” she recalled. “It’s addictive.”

She would flit across the field, focusing, as she always does, on making each move flow into the next one, the baton boomeranging up into the air and (hopefully) back down into her artfully outstretched hand.

Liles’s father watched every toss and every catch.

“Once a young lady learns to do it and do it well, it’s an art,” Mike R. Liles said in a telephone interview.

Now, Liles calls her parents almost daily, often to consult with them about the fine points of her routine. She says they have supported her twirling since she began at age nine; her mother even sewed her earliest costumes.

Liles’ father used to drive her across the state to twirling competitions in Waco and Arlington. Liles fondly recalls how her father made traveling to a competition seven or eight hours away into a fun family excursion.

But those days are now over. “Here in Texas it seems to be a dying art,” said Liles, who makes a living as a hospital courier.

And his daughter, who aspires to be a cardiovascular surgeon, is more than 1,800 miles away. He has only been to Cambridge once, to drop Lindsay off freshman year, and has never seen her perform at a Harvard football game.

(NOT) THE IVY LEAGUE’S DRAW

The only other baton twirler performing with an Ivy League band is Amy G. Horwath, a senior at Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration.

“Football is not the Ivy League’s draw, so I can see why we don’t have huge twirling here,” Horwath said.

At Harvard, Aaron R. Scherer ’11 had considered going to Ohio State University to twirl as a drum major with the school’s band. Since choosing Harvard, he has given a few spontaneous performances outside of Mower, but hasn’t joined the band.

“Everyone seems to like it,” Scherer said of his displays, “But I wasn’t sure it would be worth it here.”

But general audiences and die-hard fans have enthusiastically received Liles.

The band’s drum major, Greg D. Dyer ’09, reports that one of the most frequent compliments the band receives is about how good the twirler is.

“I think she’s totally bold, and that’s totally a good thing,” said occasional football spectator Jena N. Mills ’11.

Liles’s fans have created a Facebook group to celebrate her twirling, “Harvard Supporters of the Harvard Batonist,” which had 32 members as of press time.

“I go to like all the major football games,” said roommate Chuang, “I don’t go to watch football. I go to watch Lindsay.”

On the field Liles sparkles against the green turf in skintight sequined costumes, including a short white outfit emblazoned with a crimson H that she made out of an old prom dress. Her hair is piled high atop her head—she says it takes two hours to style it for competition—and her skin shimmers with glitter spray, glitter powder, and roll-on body glitter.

Of course, glitter isn’t her whole life. She’s also a member of the ballroom dance team, a Drug and Alcohol Peer Adviser, and a member of Phillips Brooks House’s Chinatown Afterschool Program. She recently declared a concentration in Biological Anthropology.

But here in Mather Dining Hall, in between bites of mixed greens and red chili hummus, Liles is all twirler. She performs her signature move. It is called the layback, and she does it nearly every time she performs: She leans back some 90 degrees, arms flung behind her head and one leg kicked out, only a single tiptoe connecting her to the earth.