By Jolie Robinson

Xindi Liu ‘26 is a familiar name, whether you’re in the band room, the dance studio, at robotics competitions, or even reading Moffly Media’s “Darien’s Top 10 Teens to Watch.”

The RCDS community has seen Liu on stage as the captain of the Cedar Street Dance Company and leader of the Dance With a Purpose Club. Her contemporary ballet solos are often accompanied by “music that makes me move when I listen to it,” she says, noting, “For my senior solo, I chose ‘这样很好’ from Arcane, which both pays homage to my Chinese background and is about holding on to memories as people leave you.”  Liu danced since childhood before quitting in fifth grade for synchronized swimming, which she jokes about having “sucked at…! I came back to it in the second half of eighth grade because I started watching Dance Moms and have never looked back since.”

She has also participated in many of our school musicals. She played a ring leader ancestor in the 2023 production of The Addams Family, a wolf in Into the Woods, and a featured dancer in Head Over Heels the following years. When asked about her lack of participation in this year’s production of Les Misérables, Liu proclaims that “As Cedar Street captain, I decided to stay committed to dance throughout the whole year. Also, I started choreographing and teaching my group piece during the winter season, which would not have been possible had I opted to do Les Mis instead.”

Though ensemble in these shows, she is anything but a background character in the orchestra. Liu played principal clarinet with the Norwalk Youth Symphony in Austria and Czechia in 2025. She also received a perfect score for her 2025 New York State School Music Association (NYSSMA) Evaluation. To Liu, playing the clarinet is “a way to be a part of something bigger. When I’m playing in my symphony orchestra, I’m simply a part of a whole, and that’s one of my favorite parts about it. I especially love it when the entire orchestra is playing their hearts out, and it floods the hall. It’s rather euphoric.”

Her love for music doesn’t stop there, though. Liu can often be found making her own music under the pseudonym of love, lydia. Her singles “comic relief” and “change so quickly” provide insight into the teenage brain and the common high school experience. One lyric illustrates this: “The noise, it echoes in my head / With the life that I would’ve led / Ringing in my ears” (“change so quickly”, 1:30-39). “comic relief” and “change so quickly” can be found on Spotify.

In 2023 and 2024, Liu partook in the annual Greenwich Country Day School TigerHacks competition. According to the GCDS website, “TigerHacks brings students from multiple schools together to celebrate innovation, problem-solving, and creativity through a friendly coding competition designed by high‑schoolers, for high‑schoolers.” At the inaugural TigerHacks in 2023, Liu and RCDS graduates Jaymin Ding ’25 and Katia Ohmacht ’24 swept first place for RCDS. The following year, along with Charles Iwanski ’26 and Arav Ramaswamy ’26, Liu’s team took fifth place. Liu’s proficiency in C++, Java, and Python led her and the school to victory. She mentions that love for robotics, and drive to now become one of the Robotics captains, comes from “[her] parents [who] studied electrical engineering in college…I’ve also always loved math, and the way all the questions had a distinct path to the correct answer has always felt satisfying to me.” She also received a perfect PSAT/NMSQT score in 2024 and has advanced to National Merit Finalist status this year.

Though Xindi Liu is graduating from the RCDS to move on to the engineering program at Cornell University, her legacy will remain. She shared a final inspiring statement: “Dance is one of the only forms of art where the product, in some ways, is your own body.” For dancers, or anyone in the arts, these are wise words to live by.