Course Description: No grades. No tests. No papers. Optional attendance; music and dancing every class. Welcome to World Dance. World Dance, an extracurricular class led by Instructor in Spanish Comfort Halsey ’97, gathers once a week to share, learn, and dance as a community. “You don’t have to have experience, and you don’t have to come back after one class. It is a very open atmosphere,” she said. In fact, you don’t even have to be a part of the PA community to attend. To be sure, World Dance is the “chillest class” on campus. Ms. Halsey ’97, who comes from a broad dancing background, wanted the classes to be similar to African dance classes she took in college. “[They were] just a group of drummers and dancers who danced for an hour and a half without stopping,” she said. Halsey came up with the idea for World Dance soon after she began to teach dance here at PA. She wanted to give students the opportunity to experience the kind of dance culture that made her fall in love with the art. However, she realized that her vision included many more types of dance than she could ever teach alone. Therefore, she enlisted the help of students whom she felt could bring new knowledge and techniques to the class. “‘I myself don’t teach all of the classes; I just have the interest, and I view myself as the facilitator,” she said. Students who have taught the class include Kendra Allenby ’05, Temy Devers ’05, and Nandini Vijayakumar ’06. Devers, who taught Hip Hop, liked the way the group acted together, and said,“‘Even though not everybody knew each other, and some people weren’t from PA, it still felt like a community.” Vijayakumar, who taught a class on Indian Classical dance noted a similarly cooperative feeling, “We all danced together, no one split up into groups even though there were different skill levels… in my own [experiences from past] lessons we would all split up and take turns, because of the different levels.” Even more than this sense of community, fun, and the chance to learn something new, is what attracts people to World Dance. Michelle Nguyen ’07, a regular attendee, said she enjoyed “just trying new stuff, something totally different that you wouldn’t be able to learn anywhere else from anyone else.” She also said that because World Dance is not a required part of the dance curriculum, “People come because they want to dance…they are not there because they have to, it’s because they want to.” Initially, the mission of the class was to get through as much new dance material as possible in the space of a year. Ms. Halsey said, “I got it going… first of all to give students a chance to teach and give people a chance to see these kinds of dance.” Indeed, the class did not repeat two sessions of the same type of dance until this year. However, as the program progressed its objectives changed. On the possibility of future performances Halsey said, “While there is no kind of recital yet, now that we do do several kinds of focused classes in a row, we may be able to do it in the future.” For those who like to dance but play another sport, are too shy, or just want a little taste of something different, there is a welcoming community waiting for you in the gym’s upstairs dance studio on Wednesdays at 6pm.
