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February 22, 2007
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February 22, 2007 |
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Student and community ballroom dance lessons —
“Quick, quick, slow,” Sara Andrews shouted on Saturday afternoon as she counted out the steps she was teaching to the 56 Yellow Springs High School students and community members who came to the high school for ballroom dancing lessons. Laughter and talking drowned out the instructor’s voice at times, as the room full of twinkle toes got acclimated to swinging their bodies to the big band beat and clinging to a partner 20 to 50 years either older or younger than themselves.
School board member Aida Merhemic danced with YSHS basketball player Kilan Brown, and Dr. Bob Morrison danced with drama club member Mary Hyde. Students danced with students, community members danced with community members, and friends danced with their friends. “It’s a lot of fun to learn to dance in a community setting like this,” Bob Huston said after Saturday’s lesson. Dancing is something high school students sometimes find difficult to do, even at school dances organized specifically for them, junior Alex Visbal said. Hip-hop is the style of music that tends to dominate school dances, and it requires a kind of loose improvisational dancing skill that not everyone is comfortable with, he said. Those who either prefer an alternative music genre or don’t feel able to “bump and grind,” won’t be seen on the floor. So this year, the junior class, which by tradition is organizing this year’s prom on May 5, has decided to offer a dance alternative. Prom committee members, including Lara Donnelly and Miriam Barcus, with the help of the 2008 class advisor Donna Haller, have organized a series of ballroom dancing lessons to get more people in the groove to move to a wider selection of music.
Students and community members at large are invited to attend the junior class ballroom dance lessons every Saturday afternoon from March 3 to 31, from 2 to 3:30 p.m. in the high school gym. At $10 a lesson, participants are welcome to come for just one or all five of the remaining lessons taught by Golden City Ballroom instructors Andrews and James Miller. The series focuses on the rumba, swing, the hustle and the fox trot, and on learning how to identify which dance goes with which rhythm so the leaders can slide smoothly from one dance into the next. According to Donnelly, ballroom dancing is just another way to have fun at prom and add to the repertoire of dance styles. She has been watching the national ballroom dancing competition on PBS and is inspired to learn more herself. She hopes to get more students to attend the lessons to complement the diverse range of community members who have turned out to chase away the wintertime blues. Local resident Paul Wagner is an experienced dancer who brought his wife, Carolyn Treadway, whom he married in November, to learn how to dance. Treadway ended up dancing with nearly everyone in the room and was able to learn not only from her husband but from others who were also new to dancing, she said. Visbal, who likes to dance and has learned salsa, merengue and vallenato from his cousins in Colombia, was enthusiastic about learning a new set of movements to an old time kind of music. On Saturday, he met people in the community that he hadn’t known before. And the next day he and his girlfriend, Rosa Dixon, who has studied ballroom dancing and helped come up with the idea of offering dance lessons to the community, were already practicing their new moves for prom. The formal dancing complements the theme of this year’s prom, “An Affair to Remember” and will hopefully add some ’40s flare to the event to be held at the Springfield Masonic Temple, Donnelly said. The Yellow Springs Community Band will play big band tunes for the first hour of prom, where guests can avoid the wallflower tendency and move through to dance styles of vastly different eras. Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com
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