The members of the Swing Dancing Club have decided to incorporate more types of choreography. Therefore, a name change is in order, and the club now calls itself the Ballroom Choreography Club. Both its teachers and participants alike are ready to get started this semester.
“It’s been called Swing Dancing in the past so we changed the name to try to get more people interested,” said senior mathematics major TC Squires. “We are going to be doing more than just swing dancing this year, so we decided to just go ahead and change it to Ballroom Dancing.”
This club meets every Tuesday at 5 p.m. in Evans Student Center.
“I thought it would be fun to learn different styles of dance,” said junior history major Danielle Wilson. “Through this club I have met some really great people.”
There are no fees or time commitments to join the club. Members are encouraged to come as many or as few times as they would like.
“[We meet] once a week for about an hour,” said junior Christian studies major Adam Gosnell. “It’s a really low commitment, especially when you get a solid hour of exercise out of it.”
The group’s teachers are Ouachita students. Junior church music major Stewart Kelly has been teaching for two years.
“We are there helping students and teaching them new things,” Kelly said. “After a few weeks, students get over their awkward phase and start to really dance. It’s so cool to see people have so much fun doing something you taught them.”
In addition to bringing students together in the form of teachers and dancers, this club used to be a cohort affect with the Henderson campus until last spring. Squires hopes to remedy this and get both schools involved once again.
“It used to be a collaborative program with Henderson,” he said. “We are trying to involve [their] campus somehow.”
The members make regular visits to the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs on the weekends to get some dance experience and to learn new things.
“They always have a live band and we can actually practice in a real situation the moves that we’ve learned or learn new things,” Squires said. “It’s always interesting to watch — there are older people that go and they do all sorts of stuff that I don’t even know how to do. It’s just a good night on the town type of thing.”
After being in the club the past two years, Wilson is still a huge fan of being a part of the group.
“It is one of the things I do for stress relief and is the highlight of my day,” Wilson said. “I just love to dance. I love the people, and I love to have fun.”
