Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) has had a tradition with every years incoming freshmen class to offer them a week of events to help them to make friends, get used to campus and enjoy the final week before classes officially start call Navigating Rensselaer and Beyond (NRB). As part of this week long event the Swing Club here on campus had an opportunity to host a day of workshops to expose and hopefully encourage these new college kids to take a passion in the dance.
I was really worried about how this event would turn out because there are many other activities which the students get to choose from and that we had to compete with ranging from other dance workshops, hiking trips, acting and site seeing trips. I shouldn’t have worried though as we ended up with 25 kids most of which were really interested and chose Swing Revival (No we didn’t name it RPI did. A little too neo swing for my taste) as one of their top 5 choices. Around half of those who had attended also had some experience with 6-count lindy beforehand.
The classes that were taught treated everyone as a beginner (which they all were) and started with 6-count footwork progressing into 8-count (lindy hop footwork) later. Besides just teaching the footwork we held a beginner Charleston class and also a cool moves class to end the day with. The workshops were taught by Josh Fialkoff, Debbi Risch, Ellie Hanus and I with each of us teaching a class with a different person each time. Josh Fialkoff taught the first class with Debbi Risch which concentrated on teaching basic footwork and some basic turns with the next class taught by Ellie Hanus who is the regular instructor for the Swing Club and me doing beginning Charleston with how to get in and out of the move with transition to face to face Charleston. The day ended with a more in depth class about connection and more advanced concepts by josh and Ellie with Debbi and me closing out the day with a cool moves class which by that time everyone was exhausted.
I have taken a decent amount of workshops, lessons and a few privates so I feel fairly comfortable with much of the material which we covered throughout the day and have helped out some people one on one with learning much of the basics of lindy hop. Never though had I really ever though about how it is for a person to teach to a large number of people. I realize now that it takes a lot of work, thought and planning to have a successful class when you teach. Overall the students enjoyed the classes which we had taught and the only complaint which we got was that it started too early in the morning (8:30am yeah way too early). To help support this view we held a dance a couple of days later for the people who attended the workshop to try out what they had learned. When the lesson before the dance started we had over 100 students come join us and that number stayed steady for the first 1hr and a half of the dance before dwindling down towards the end.
Looking back at this event I am extremely pleased with how things went and the enthusiasm that was showed by the people who attended not only the workshops but also the dance many of whom have showed up at the Swing Club lessons which started last week. I hope this energy will continue throughout the school year.
