Transcript: One Step and One Pirouette at a Time

Laveen Naidu
Executive Director, Dance Theatre of Harlem

The Dance Theater of Harlem is a magical place. It really, really is. Its founding principles are education, social awareness and artistic excellence. And it really is fundamentally about creating opportunity and access for people of any walk of life, to fulfill their dreams at the highest level.

The Aetna Foundation Healthy Dancers, Healthy Families initiative is really a multi-folded kind of approach. It takes what we do the best, what we’re expert at, which is training bodies and dancers and influencing community, and putting a health focus on it.

The ballet fit class is designed to get parents and their children to work together. So it’s a combination of a ballet class, a fitness class, there are elements of it that’s very aerobic, there are elements of it that’s strength building and stretching. But then you’re going to see people jumping and traveling across the room, but also partnering with their children -- doing it together. And there’s something wonderful, wonderful, wonderful about a young person watching their mom or dad do something. Because it makes it okay for them to do. It tells them that that’s important.

Dance speaks to people in ways that maybe going to the gym and lifting weights or walking a treadmill may not speak to them.

Lufthanza Boothe
Fitness Class Participant

I hardly get to do any exercise. Coming out here and burning all this, I’m hot, and I want to do some more. I want to come back. I want to do this class some more.

Laveen Naidu

The residents of Harlem are at particular risk for obesity, high blood pressure. If you were to walk around a five-block radius of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, I would challenge you to find many healthy eating options.

Come the way you are, get in the studio with your children, and experience firsthand what it’s like to get in touch with your body, what it’s like to imagine a little bit, what it’s like to dream a little bit. And the young people especially start to imagine a life for themselves that they don’t necessarily see in their immediate surroundings. And when you have that kind of aspiration, when you can see yourself doing something out of the ordinary, then you change.

Darryl Quinton
Dance Teacher,
Dance Theatre of Harlem

Dance incorporates the soul. Yes? And when you dance your soul is free. There’s no better feeling the world.