Dancing with the SCADDIES brings dance to Café SCAD
By Emma Durham
On Jan. 16, the back rooms of Café SCAD were hoppin’. The reason? Over 30 students assembled to learn traditional partner dancing. The event, “Dancing with the SCADDIES,” was organized by Residence Life in order to introduce SCAD students to new styles of dance.
Over 30 students were laughing and chatting while they tried out the basic steps of salsa, swing, waltz, and merengue.
The evening started out at 9:00 with an hour of lessons. Residence Life, enlisted the help of Max Reinhardsen and Kyle Miller to teach waltz, salsa, and merengue. For the swing portion of the night, SCAD Swing Club’s Alex Miller and Alexa Cohen taught while the rest of Swing Club showed up to support ResLife.
Lessons were followed by free dancing from 10 until midnight, featuring a playlist that jumped from big band swing from the 40’s to modern salsa hits to waltzes by Norah Jones, ensuring that students got a chance to practice all of the dances they’d learned.
Some of the highlights of the evening were an impromptu performance of the dance to Soulja Boy’s “Crank That,” an enthusiastic line dance to Rednex’s “Cotton Eye Joe,” and Swing Club leading a 1930’s line dance called the Shim Sham.
While many of the attendees were Swing Club members, there were quite a few students with no previous dance experience. “It’s pretty unique,” freshman architecture major Robert Morrison said. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
One success of the night was the ratio between boys and girls, which was almost even. Many dance events have this ratio seriously off balance, with girls outnumbering boys two to one or more, which slows down the lessons.
To learn some these dances and more, check out:
• Swing Club, Saturday at 8:45 pm in the Student Center, free
• Salsa lessons, Tuesday at 6:30 pm at Tantra Lounge, $10
• Ballroom Dancing, prices and locations vary
• Argentine Tango, Sunday at 1:30 at Doris Martin Dance Studio, $2
Full disclosure: author is a Swing Club member
