All the kids wanted to do was Soulja Boy’s superman dance. Not ballet. Not tap. Not jazz. Soulja Boy.

But as the rambunctious rug rats began thrusting their arms forward and their legs backwards, the group’s instructors noticed something. The kids were doing ballet. They didn’t know it, of course, but the superman move looked an awful lot like ballet’s arabesque position.

“Guys, you’re almost doing an arabesque, look at this,” said one of the Georgetown students leading the class.

One of ballet’s more basic positions, the arabesque involves the dancer standing on his or her left leg and extending the left arm forward while extending the right arm and right leg backward.
“No, we’re doing Soulja Boy,” they said.

That may have been about as close as they got to ballet that day. But it was a start.

That scene, recalled by several of the instructors present on that late autumn evening, is typical of Dance DC. A program started in 2005 to extend the arts to the city’s youth, Dance DC is a mentorship program for children in Southeast D.C.

Once a week, groups of Georgetown students visit two separate sites, a YMCA and a Boys and Girls Club, where they offer a one-hour dance instruction. But while the class may be in dance, group members say they hope that the lessons learned are far more overarching.

Giving Back

For Stacey Huggins, a Georgetown administrator, there was never any question of whether she would return to her native Southeast.
“I wanted to give back to the community I grew up in,” she said. “I wanted to give back through the arts. … It is something that was innate.”

Huggins, who graduated from Berklee College of Music in Boston and for the past seven years has served at Georgetown as the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ business manager, said that when she was younger, the attitude that pervaded her neighborhood was that you could not leave. She, however, felt differently.

“I used arts to get out. I never believed that,” she said. “I always stepped out of the community, but I also worked in the community. I didn’t feel like I was stuck.”

Throughout her childhood and when she returned to the District after graduating, Huggins involved herself in service projects. After attending as a kid, she volunteered for the City at Peace program, a nation-wide non-profit organization that uses performances to raise awareness about youth drug and alcohol abuse. She has also served as a peer counselor, a Ward Eight youth counselor, and a member of the Mayor’s Youth Leadership Institute.

In 2004, however, she decided to try a greater undertaking: creating her own nonprofit group. She began the Youth Investment Ministry of the Arts to provide an outlet for kids in Southeast D.C. through arts. The project aimed to incorporate all varieties of art: dance, music, drama and visual arts. The first classes, which were dance, were offered in November 2005 at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic School on Morris Road in Southeast.
As she was forming the group, Huggins looked for interested volunteers to sit on her board of directors. Jennafer Bonello (COL ’06), then a Georgetown junior working for Huggins at the graduate school, liked the sound of combining dance with community service and became YIMA board’s secretary.

“It was an amazing project that Stacey had created,” said Bonello, who helped Huggins obtain nonprofit status for the group. “It started with dance and then it could break into other types of music.”

Soon, though, Bonello realized that the YIMA concept could be sustainable as a Georgetown student group. She began looking for student volunteers to teach dance once a week, and in the spring of 2006, the group, as GUYIMA, became a part of the Center for Social Justice.

Bonello recalls dance classes being small to start, perhaps 10 to 12 kids in the fifth to eighth grade range. Early on, GUYIMA received some help from the Free Music Academy and the Academy for Dance.

“It was incredible to go see the kids, to see how excited they were,” Bonello said. “Dance offered something different for them.” Bonello, however, was a second semester senior. If the group was going to continue past its first semester, new leaders would need to take charge.

Many of the group’s volunteers were first attracted to the group because it combined the passions and disciplines of both dance and community service.

“I found that there wasn’t a better way for me to get involved within the D.C. community than through Dance DC. Dance DC is an organization in which each member loves to dance and share his or her talent with others.”said group member Laura Chalfin (COL ‘10) Every week, a small group of volunteers would trek to Southeast D.C. to teach a class. But these courses, as they quickly learned, were a far cry from the more traditional classes they were familiar with.

“It was really challenging learning to be dance instructor,” said Elizabeth Arnold (MSB ’09), who succeeded Bonello as president and served for three semesters. “I knew I wanted to spread my love of dance but it was so different from traditional dance classes. I get to these dance classes and everyone runs into walls, falls down, screams, eats pizza on the side. It was so chaotic. We eventually learned to manage it.”

Chalfin added, “Although it was sometimes difficult to catch the attention of some rowdy and overly excited dancers, the ‘If you can hear my voice, clap once. If you can hear my voice, clap twice,’ saying proved to be effective.”

Getting in the Groove

During her junior year term as president, Arnold was responsible for changing the name of the group to Dance DC so as to make more apparent its mission. She also selected two new sites, the Anthony Bowen YMCA in Southeast D.C. and the Jelleff Boys and Girls Club near Safeway in Georgetown, as well as greatly increasing the number of volunteers.

“She’s been exceptional in many ways,” said Suzanne Tarlov, the group’s CSJ advisor. “She has a clear commitment. She goes to all ends to make sure it works, and she made use of all possible resources. She is mindful of her volunteers. She is thoughtful and contemplative. She has a lot of vision.”

“Liz did the leg work so we could do the fun part,” Pete Forbes (COL ’08), one of the group’s volunteers, says.

Still, as the group has grown and extended its reach, there have been other challenges. Just the nature of her peers on the Hilltop has sometimes made Arnold wonder about Dance DC’s impact.

“I wasn’t always sure Dance DC was accomplishing what I wanted it to,” she said. “I was talking to someone about the clubs trying to end genocide in Darfur and end world hunger, and I wasn’t sure if Dance DC was accomplishing anything.”

Just by serving as president for so long, Arnold gave the group an advantage, Tarlov explained.

“It’s just the nature of higher ed,” she says. “You only have four years. You usually have sophomores leading the group and they have great vision, they may or may not do great work and then they are gone. Then someone new with a new vision comes in. it’s difficult to create long-term commitment to change.”

Organized dance classes, many participants note, are often expensive and therefore are not readily available to the students in Southeast. The Dance DC initiative offers children a weekly lesson at no cost, introducing students to the more formal side of the art form.

It’s also pretty fun and offers a few more lessons than just how to shake your body.

“It’s a good activity to get them exercising and having fun,” said member Pete Forbes (COL ’08). “It’s a bonding activity and a nice consistent aspect in their lives. We were there as role models which they might not have at home or elsewhere.”

Lynn Kirshbaum (SFS ’10), another volunteer who coordinates the Boys and Girls Club site, said she thinks it is important for the kids to meet an authority figure other than their parents and teachers, something many children do not encounter until their first job.

“Apart from learning how to dance — a little bit, kind of — they get mentored,” said Carolyn Arnold (COL ’11), the rising president of Dance DC and a copy assistant for The Hoya. “They are always excited to see us walk through the door. You can see they really look up to the Georgetown students.”

The kids are not the only ones who get a kick out of the weekly lessons. The Georgetown students also say they feel rewarded.
“The members of Dance DC gained much respect from both the children and the YMCA staff.” Chalfin explained. “By the end of the semester, I feel the Dance DC members had grown a great relationship with the kids.”

Forbes agreed: “I thought it would be fun to sign up to combine three of my favorite things: hanging out with friends, dancing and helping little kids.”

More than anything, Georgetown students involved recall the lighter moments of working with four- to six-year-olds.
“One day we asked kids for suggestions of rules and every other one was don’t hit, don’t slap, don’t punch, don’t lick,” said Elizabeth Arnold.

“They really like freeze dance,” Carolyn Arnold said. “The only fail-safe way to get them to be quiet is to threaten to take away freeze dance. One time I said, ‘If you are not quiet in five seconds, we’re not going to do freeze dance.’ By the time I got to one, you could hear a pin drop.”

Forbes recalled the kids’ affection for the dance to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” “They all liked crawling around like zombies. They loved pretending to be zombies,” he said.

Now all the group needs to do is figure out which ballet step can be taught with the King of Pop’s famous song.

— Hoya Staff Writer Laura McKenzie contributed to this report.