Longtime Lansing dance program nears milestone | News, Sports, Jobs

LANSING — For Beck Diamond, dancing wasn’t just a way to make new friends. It was a reason to go to school.

Diamond, now an adult, was having truancy issues when she enrolled at Lansing’s Vivian Riddle Middle Magnet School for Visual and Performing Arts. One of four children with a single mother, she had little interest in school, and skipped class often.

That is, until she started a dance class at Riddle.

“It gave me a reason to stay in school and to get up and go to school,” Diamond told the Lansing State Journal. “Going to Riddle gave me an emotional outlet to vent.”

Diamond went on to Everett High School, where she took dance all four years. Her classes there helped her graduate and continue to college and a brief stint in the military.

In 2024, the Everett High School dance program will celebrate its 50th birthday. Ahead of the milestone, the program is still growing. Students recently began practicing in a new studio in Everett, and Lansing School District produced a new documentary about the program that premiered Jan. 29. The film serves to honor a program that’s given countless students like Diamond a second home at school.

Karen Sprecher, who subbed in Lansing School District for 33 years, started the after-school club her first year on the job, in 1973. It became a class a year later, and Sprecher taught two sessions. She worked with Kit Carter, head of the district’s performing arts department at the time, who wanted to add dance to the curriculum.

Speaker started by standing in the Everett hallways, surveying students about their interest in a dance elective. The classes started filling up once they were offered.

“I danced my whole life at a private studio and minored in dance at Michigan State University,” said Sprecher, also a founding member of the studio Happendance. “I wanted to be a teacher, but I never imagined I could teach dance. No school had dance in their curriculum at the time.”

The same holds true today: Everett is one of the few schools in the state offering dance as part of its curriculum. Today, students start at Lansing’s Dwight Rich School of the Arts and move on to Everett.

Nearly 50 years later, the program continues to grow. It recently moved into a new room in Everett with large windows that bathe the studio with light. It’s survived an era in education when arts programs are among the first cuts to shrinking budgets.

Clara Martinez now leads the Everett dance program, teaching five classes a week between Everett and Dwight Rich. The program attracts 150 to 200 students a year.

Martinez treats dance as a field of study and academic inquiry. She teaches her students different styles, from modern to jazz to West African, asking students to engage their bodies and the space around them.

She also uses dance to help students understand other areas of academics. One example is the “I Am” project, a collaboration with the Wharton Center for Performing Arts, in which students use dance to share their experience living through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dance is a perfect addition to any curriculum, she said.

“It helps create a more well-rounded and evolved and cultured person,” Martinez said. “If you feel that you have something to say, but if you’re not outspoken, dance is a way for you to work out what you want your voice to be, what you want your voice to say.”

This year’s crop of Everett dancers is finding solace in the school’s new studio, learning a discipline they can use to express themselves, get motivated, or escape from the stressors of everyday life.

On a recent Tuesday, Devin Carter danced with 14 other junior and senior girls in Everett’s Senior Dance Company to the likes of Beyonce and Prince. She’s loved dance as a form of expression for as long as she can remember.

“I’ve always been dancing around the house my whole life,” she said.

Carter first learned about the dance program when she was a 7th grader and eagerly awaited the audition for advanced classes as a freshman.

Tasha Gaines, a senior in the dance company, always looks forward to class on tough school days. It doesn’t just give her an avenue of expression, but a community to return to.

“Dance is something I could never give up,” she said. “It means a lot to me and I wouldn’t want to give it up.”

Diamond never gave it up, either. She participated in dance all through school, and later worked with Happendance and a Lansing Community College show during her junior and senior years, helping with choreography.

Everett’s program eventually steered her toward college.

“That became the goal,” Diamond said. “To go to higher education because I could keep dancing there.”

After a stint at Western Michigan University interrupted by financial trouble, Diamond joined the Army for three years, then re-enrolled at University of Washington and started dancing again.

Today she lives in Washington, where she runs a nonprofit, Meander Dance Collective. The group provides adult dancers performance opportunities and now brings dance into local schools.

She recently wrote a short essay on the importance of dance in school as a means of organizing her thoughts on the subject. Among its benefits, she wrote, is the sense of self-confidence it instills:

“In a society that deems some people more worthy than others to take up space, dance is an intervention into those internalized feelings of worthlessness,” she wrote. “Every time our kids perform they are practicing presence and taking up space.”

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