UOFL DANCE SOCIETY 2015/16
The academic year 2015/16 has been an eventful one for the University of Liverpool Dance Society. With 166 members, we have maintained our popularity amongst the student body with the events and activities the society has created this year.
As one of the largest Societies at the guild, we offer a wide range of dance classes, welcome students of any ability to come along anytime during the year. These include: Tap, Ballet (Advance and Beginners), Street, Contemporary, Jazz, Irish and Zumba classes. With these classes taking place every week, and a bi-weekly e-newsletter we have built a strong group of committed dancers and developed a close knit society. To add to the sense of community, we even designed our new kits for our dancers to wear around campus.
We aimed to provide these inexpensive dance classes of a variety of styles and levels, with the opportunity for our members to be able to perform and fundraise for the society. This can be seen from our two highly entertaining annual showcases, the summer and the winter showcase organised and arranged by our performance coordinator, Nehana Gittens. For our summer showcase we were able to choreograph dances to the theme ‘movie soundtracks’ and raised up to £800. Our upcoming winter showcase (12th May) is themed to be the seven deadly sins, a great opportunity for dancers to showcase their improvements in their dance skills.
With our active student body, we also commit to fundraising and helping two main charities, Children in Need and MENCAP. For Children in Need, we organised a dance-a-thon along with a bake sale. With the help of many other societies, like Street society, Bakesoc and the cheerleaders (Athletic Union) we had a popular (and fun!) turnout on the day. Our regular monthly MENCAP sessions with Liverpool’s MENCAP learners take place every month, to which our charity coordinator, Shelley Khan, choreographs and teach them simple but extremely engaging choreography. It always brings a bright smile to the members and is a lovely experience for both the society and anyone who comes along.
The Dance Society extends beyond campus and gets involved with many other local Universities as well. We have our own competition squad and together we train every week to compete at different competitions. This year this year we attended four, including: Manchester, Loughborough, LJMU and OUR OWN! This was our FIRST EVER inter-university dance competition. 11 Universities came to Liverpool, with a grand total of 500 dancers - safe to say that they were all thoroughly impressed. Our results were also a great turnout placing first, first runner up and second runner up with our respective pieces at various competitions. All the great work owed to our competition coordinators - Laura Dorman and Jenna Doherty.
The University of Liverpool’s Dance Society has had a busy year, but it has also been one that is full of achievements. We hope our members have enjoyed this academic year with us and hopefully will be able to expand our society even more next year.
