EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES
A Passion for Dance “THERE IS A BIT OF INSANITY
in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good,” wrote dance critic Edwin Denby. For those looking for that “bit of insanity” on campus, Wellesley College has varied opportunities. While there may not be an academic dance program in place (dance classes are taught through the Department of Physical Education, Recreation, and Athletics), the College boasts a multitude of student-run extracurricular dance groups. Students organize and run the groups, as well as choreograph, rehearse, and perform. Wellesley’s formally organized dance groups are ascenDance (ballet), the Belly Dancing Society, Dance Collective (modern), FreeStyle (hip-hop), Gumboot (South African dance), the Wellesley College Ballroom Dance Team, the Wellesley College Dancers (jazz, lyrical, and ballet), and Yanvalou (Afro-Haitian dance). And some students travel to Cambridge to dance with the MIT Ballroom Club. Others aren’t organized into formal groups. “There Th are Indian ethnic dancers who are not that involved in campus performances,” says Elaine Wong ’11, an architecture major who dances with the Wellesley College Dancers. “[And] we had a group perform a form of Irish dance.” Wong herself started with Chinese ethnic dance at age 4 and continued for years. “Dance has basically
PHOTOS BY RICHARD HOWARD
been my stress reliever ever since I can remember. You step on the dance fl floor, competition floor, performance space, and for that moment of time, you can just dance your heart out.” In addition to exploring lyrical, ballet, and modern on campus, she danced for two years with the MIT Ballroom Club. However, in her senior year, Wong decided to concentrate solely on the Wellesley College Dancers. “We’ve [had great] student choreographers. And I feel like the stress that Wellesley induces makes for really good dances [and] choreographers [who] get really into it”—resulting in expressive pieces. Rebecca Graber ’11, a double major in math and computer science, is the copresident of the Wellesley College Ballroom Dance Team and is also writing a computer-science honors thesis on computer-aided choreography. She’s a dedicated ballroom dancer who doesn’t mind taking the bus to Cambridge multiple times each week for the MIT Ballroom Dance Club. Before Wellesley, she’d dabbled in diff fferent styles of dance, but when she arrived on campus, “ballroom sort of came in and took over my life.” During orientation week, she says, “I ended up in the ballroom dance team camp introduction [at MIT]—and the rest is history!” Graber has learned to deal with the bus commute by doing problem sets on the bus. Still, she Elaine Wong ’11 and Anna Zhang ’11 of the Wellesley College Dancers
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2011 spring 2011