Savoy Swing Club is proud to announce Rhythm Seattle, a new program to provide quality swing dance instruction in every high school in the Greater Seattle area!
We need your help to start building this amazing program. We will be looking to fill 5 after school programs in different schools in 2014-2015 year. We are hoping to build more, but aiming to start with 1 quarter per school.
Your funds will go directly into getting and training professional instructors in a curriculum that highlights core principles of connection.
The ultimate goal of Rhythm Seattle is to have swing dance instruction in every public and private high school in the Greater Seattle area. The opportunities differ by type and structure of school but could include everything from after school programs to Physical Education. We’ll provide the highly skilled, certified instructors along with most of the money to pay them, charging the schools an affordable amount and making up the difference through donors and grants. With enough support, we can make affordable swing dance instruction a reality for every kid in the region. That in turn will grow our swing scene by leaps and bounds as more young people learn to swing out and take that knowledge to the venues and more advanced classes and competitions in the community.
It’s a big goal. We start now.
Communication can be appropriate or inappropriate, reliable or unreliable, gentle or violent. The partnership of swing dancing teaches appropriate, reliable and gentle physical and mental communication—the dance doesn’t work without it. And those lessons percolate out into the daily life of dancers. We all know the social competencies that dancers accrue. We can instill those competencies in our youth and watch them carry that into the rest of their life.
Respect for others is one of the earliest and most important lessons learned in swing dance. Respecting each other’s boundaries and wishes is central to the dance and consent is essential—if you are disrespectful to your partners, you’ll soon run out of willing partners. In dance, unlike life, you can’t force someone to interact with you—you have to ask. Young dancers quickly learn that acting respectfully is the surest way for lasting relationships. Once they’ve learned the power of respect, they’ll take it with them into their other interactions with teachers, parents and peers.
Courage can mean a lot of things but here we mean the courage to break through barriers and put yourself out there, opening yourself up to someone else even though it makes you vulnerable. Every time you ask someone to dance or agree to dance, you not only make yourself vulnerable to criticism but also face the fear that you won’t be good enough or interesting enough for your partner to have a good time. The social courage to overcome that fear is the same courage that lets you mingle at a party, network at a function or reach out to a stranger in need. We build that courage extended hand by extended hand until it is a part of who we are in all of our interactions.
We believe in healthy communities. To build healthy communities, we need to help people find their Rhythm: The Communication, Respect and Courage they need to connect with each other on and off the dance floor. By teaching our youth the skills that are really life skills in disguise, we can help them be contributors to healthy communities for the rest of their lives.