ednberkeley

[ednberkeley]

Read more about our involvement with #tedtalks#TedxStanford in EDN!'s national newsletter!  We're also honored to be featured as the chapter of the month. Yay Berkeley team! 

[ednberkeley]

Welcome some of our new EDN! B instructors - Taylor teaching middle school, Rosalind teaching elementary school, and Weishan teaching kindergarten! 

Thanks to our webmaster Pranav for the photos! :)

[ednberkeley]

Everybody Dance Now, dance everywhere!

Coordinators Connie, Pranav, and Elissa take upon themselves to dance over the Santa Cruz Boardwalk.

Photo credits: Sandra Tsai

[ednberkeley]

It gives me great joy to play with these kids every week -  Looking for a co-teacher to teach preschool dance for Everybody Dance Now! Berkeley (http://ednberkeley.org/) on Tuesdays or Fridays, 10:30am-12pm! No professional dance experience required, just a passion for movement and an absolute need to play with adorable kids! (:

And finally, a treat - sassy Miss Lilly!

Photo Credits: Yuchih

[ednberkeley]

Fifteen years ago, I found myself listening deeply to the stories my friends told about trying to teach dance in schools. Consider the experiences of two typical educators: Josh, a dance teaching artist, felt that his work was unacknowledged and unappreciated. He was expected to teach dance to 40 students in a dark, dirty multipurpose…

By Patricia Reedy

[ednberkeley]

Meet the Spring 2014 coordinator fambam! Welcoming aboard Perla as Finance & Marketing Coordinator, Gordon as Director of Communications (PR), and Pranav as Webmaster!

Read their bios here: http://ednberkeley.org/about-us/team/

[ednberkeley]

Orchard Gardens: Inspiration and living proof of the positive impact of arts education on students!

By Katy Tur, Correspondent, NBC News ROXBURY, Mass. The community of Roxbury had high hopes for its newest public school back in 2003. There were art studios, a dance room, even a theater equipped with cushy seating. A pilot school for grades K-8, Orchard Gardens was bui &

[ednberkeley]

Everybody Dance Now! featured on Cox Channel's Backbeat! Can you spot our EDN! Berkeley leaders dancing? 

[ednberkeley]

With the help of some rainbow ribbons and spaghetti sticks, we conclude EDN! Berkeley first session with La Academia de BAHIA, a local bilingual preschool in Berkeley. 

I'm sure Miss Lilly will have more to say about this experience, but it has truly been a joy playing and moving around with these kids. They have so much energy and creativity and love - always shouting out new ideas for movement, giving us goodbye hugs at the end of class. 

Our initial four-week session at BAHIA has also been a growing field for not only love and joy at what we do, but also inspiration. In these short four weeks, we have experimented and danced with different ideas and props for movement. We've read stories about movement (thank you Luna Dance's Alisa Rasera for many recommendations), had props from ribbons to stuffed animals to spaghetti, tried different types of music, studied and incorporated the California Dance Standards, and set curriculum based on teaching the Bartenieff Fundamentals using adorable animal and food analogies. 

Which brings us to exciting news for next year! With the help of TDPS staff member Marni Davis, dance educator legend Tiffany Bong, and the national team, we will be putting together a national curriculum for hip hop, as well as a Berkeley one for preschool and kindergarten-level introduction to dance, all based on the California Dance Standards.

Written with the help of dance and education experts, made with love! That's how we do at Everybody Dance Now! Berkeley :)

Much gratitude for Martha Cueva and the teachers at BAHIA for the support and trust they've provided us with, as a brand-new chapter in town! Thank you so much for this wonderful first experience!

See you all next semester!

-Miss Elissa, Chapter Director at EDN! Berkeley

[ednberkeley]

At our annual national conference in Santa Barbara, Everybody Dance Now! was filmed and featured on Cox Channel's Backbeat!

Can you spot our EDN! Berkeley leaders dancing? 

[ednberkeley]

We were so excited to be welcomed by Berkeley's dance community of 600+ students and to receive such excitement from the performers and audience members about EDN! Berkeley chapter's launch. UC Berkeley has such a vibrant and talent dance community, which has the potential to influence so many kids' lives in the surrounding areas when connected. Huge thanks to AFX Dance and Gordon for involving us in the showcase!

"For me, it was a really powerful experience to see Berkeley students engage 600 audience members all at once in movement together... It reminded me of being on stage for the performance that inspired me to found EDN! in the first place, and was incredibly energizing to experience the room united together in that way. I can't wait for EDN! Berkeley to spread this type of feeling to students all throughout the surrounding community... excited for what's to come!"

By Jackie Rotman, founder of EDN! National.

to APPLY: http://ednberkeley.org/get-involved/instructor-application/

[ednberkeley]

EDN! Berkeley and our Chapter Director, Elissa Lee, featured in the UC Berkeley Theater and Dance Performance Studies newsletter!

"Sophomore Elissa Lee is majoring in psychology, with minors in Dance & Performance Studies and Disability Studies. “ I feel as if the word ‘dance’ nowadays has too narrow of a definition, says Lee. “So often the reaction I get when I tell people I’m a dance minor, they say that they ‘can’t dance’ or if they had another life, they would love to ‘try dancing’. What they don’t realize is that dance is inside of them; the only unnatural thing is that they are conditioned to believe that dance must be performance-based.  Dance is much more than that – people are born to move, born to dance.”

She plans to pursue occupational and movement therapy as a career, incorporating dance and yoga into her practice.  “I’m hoping to work with children with disabilities such as autism, developmental disorders, Cerebral Palsy and seniors with Parkinson’s and Cerebrovascular Accidents, helping them live more comfortable lives in spite of their disabilities.” Lee recently founded a Berkeley chapter of  “Everybody Dance Now!” a national non-profit organization offering free dance classes to underprivileged youth.

Like Mendoza, Lee’s desire to work with disabled communities partly stems from her family experiences. When she was 4th grade, her family moved from Texas to Taiwan so her family could care for her grandmother, who had suffered a stroke.  Lee often accompanied her grandmother to physical therapy appointments. “Although she lost the ability to speak and walk,” says Lee, “when we reminded her of old songs and dances, she could sing every word clearly, and sway to the beat just fine.

The philosophy of dance taught in TDPS lends itself well to the combination of her studies. “I love how while the department does teach technique, it’s not the emphasis and the purpose of dance,” says Lee. “Dance is almost a grounding, a healing, a reconciliation, an expression of a celebration of being here, being in the present.”

Her professors at UC Berkeley have also shaped the way she views what it means to be disabled. “We focus on the idea that ‘dis-ability’ doesn’t mean there is a deficit, a lack, or a deviation from some norm,” she says, “but to see disability as ‘differently abled.’ Because those with disabilities all have a way to go about life, but the structure of the world just isn’t built for them.”"

[ednberkeley]

What is Everybody Dance Now! Berkeley?

You’ve probably reached this page with the confounding question: What is EDN! Berkeley? Hopefully by now you’ve realized it’s not a throwback tribute to the late 1990s hit song (sorry to disappoint, C+C Music Factory fans), but instead a nonprofit organization that offers free dance programs to kids!

Well, so, what does that mean? Well, EDN! Berkeley is a chapter of Everybody Dance Now! (EDN!), an organization founded by Jackie Rotman at age 14 in the sunny city of Santa Barbara. The mission was simple: to offer hip-hop classes to kids who otherwise wouldn’t be able to have access to them or be able to afford them. Thus far, it has expanded on a national level, including to cities like Chicago and colleges such as Stanford University.

EDN! Berkeley was specifically conceived with an awareness and recognition of the vibrant dance community that resides in the East Bay and on the UC Berkeley campus, as well as the belief that these dancers would be willing and able to share their passion through outreach classes in the local community.

As a relatively new chapter which began our journey in August 2013, we taught during the fall, 2013 semester to preschool children at the Bay Area Hispano Institute for Advancement (BAHIA), Inc.  We have plans to continue there in this upcoming semester. We also plan to expand to two classes at Washington Elementary School and two classes at King Middle School during Spring 2014.

This is an ongoing process, a creative process-- if we were making an EDN! Berkeley soup we have not perfected our recipe yet but are working to continue experimenting with more spices and vegetables and ingredients to make the best soup we can from all the ingredients we have available.

How can you help? Well, if you’re a dancer who’d love to be an ingredient, an addition to our version on the EDN! soup, a part of creating this chapter of EDN! Berkeley and a part of kids’ lives, we would be thrilled to have your expertise and your passion on our team as instructor. Each school for Spring 2014 has different needs:

If you dance modern/contemporary, and are looking for a biweekly commitment: King Middle School would like to have biweekly modern dance classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays 4-5:30pm, with a variety of dance every other week. (You would commit to one or two of the days as you are available/would prefer)

If you dance hip hop and can teach kindergarten or 3rd grade weekly: Washington Elementary School has Mondays 2:15-3pm and Wednesdays 3-4:30 dance classes.

If you have another style of dance that you would love to share, whether it be a cultural style or just a different one (including but not limited to musical theater, Bollywood, ballroom, Chinese dance, ballet, Iranian, African), and you would be able to tailor it to a classroom with not very many resources, we would love to have you come in to teach a 2-4 class module, be able to share your love of dance and its history and its richness with kids.

And if you love the ages 3-5, BAHIA would love for you to come in and teach their preschoolers to shake it (appropriately, of course) on 11:20am-12pm on either Tuesday or Thursday mornings.

AND if you’re a non-mover (administrator) who happens to also have website editing skills, writing skills, photography skills, organizational skills - we’d also love to have you help out with website or communications or basically help manage the chapter with us. And also, we’d like to convert you to the world of dance.

AND if you would like to become part of our core team (coordinator), we'd love to have you as well! We are mostly looking for a financial officer as well as a fundraising coordinator, but we are open and excited to see what you have to offer! This part of the application can be found in either application. :)

So there you have it. Who EDN! Berkeley is, what we’re doing, and how you can become a part of our family. <3

To apply as an instructor: 

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1_T5hodVKkRsWVRZLGlKRdxT2WSwVy-qfNIteWguN4C8/viewform

To apply as an administrator: 

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1BCFRSaYsL2tn59q8eESa2smnAYgl0N8GfUZrrnCFMcU/viewform

By Elissa Lee, Chapter Director