Dance is a key to better self

In an effort to introduce the Long Beach neighborhood to dance-profession wonders, Cal State Long Beach has created the Community Dance Project.

Sponsored by the College of the Arts and the dance department, the program is open to all children and adults in the area who want to receive dance training on a university campus.

"The purpose of starting the project was to get the community involved in the program that we have here," CoDirector Cathy Davalos said. "The dance department offers a really great variety of classes and the community doesn't have access to those classes because they're not enrolled in the university."

"We have this beautiful facility and we've been trying to figure out a way to get the community involved with it, so we started the project to get the community involved in dancing and sharing this beautiful space with us," Davalos said.

Currently the project offers seven classes on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. "We offer the three basic core techniques: jazz, modern dance, and ballet.

For the little ones, we have creative movement which is exploration of movement, not necessarily a set technique. We want them to get use to moving and being aware of self, space and body parts," Dyan Yoshikawa, co-director of the Community Dance Project.

"We want to be able to expand our classes to maybe include some forms of ethnic dance, tap, or musical theatre," Yoshikawa said.

Classes are taught by current seniors, graduates, and master students of the dance department. The project consists of three 10-week sessions with the first session ending December 15. The next session is tentatively scheduled to begin in mid-January, according to Yoshikawa.

With half the enrollment they projected, Davalos believes that they are off to a good start. "We're really excited about the project. We had more students show up at the door to enroll and they were all really positive about taking a class," Davalos said.

Among those enrolled, Davalos said most of the students seem to be children of CSULB employees, but there are some students from other Long Beach area schools that are participating in the program.

"We both strongly feel that dance is one of the major keys to developing self-esteem and a growing selfrespect," Davalos said. "If we can help children and even adults feel better about who they are just through moving and feel good about their bodies, then we have helped them that much more.

"I think that it was a big thing to tackle at first, but I think that it was something worthwhile because we wanted to create positive feelings toward dance. This is just the starting point," Yoshikawa said.

Community Dance Project classes are held in the CSULB Dance Facility located at the southeast corner of Atherton and Palo Verde.

For more information, call 310-985-7036.