On Oct. 29, the Stockton Delta Dance Company hosted the Discovery Dance event from 4 to 5 p.m. around Delta’s campus. Dance students and guests at the event toured across campus to learn about and participate in various dance exhibitions and workshops held around various Delta facilities. SDDC toured the campus twice during the event.
“The new thing that I was exposed to is just being able to be put on the spot to just learn a new dance step, and people were able to grasp at that concept. It was just as easy as one, two, three,” said Lovetta Tugbeh, a guest at Delta and a member of the Liberia Initiative for Transformation and Enlightenment, a non-profit dedicated to helping Liberians at home, California and West Africa.
For both tours, the SDDC started the event at the bridge nearby the koi pond. At the bridge, the Modern Dance class hosted an exhibition where performers strode across the bridge to Julia Kent’s “Tourbillion.”
“Dance is basically limitless,” said Angela Santana, the SDDC club president. “You don’t need to be a certain way or be a certain thing. You can have your own tempo, your own high, your own wave. You can be anything, look like anything and just do it.”
After the Modern Dance workshop on both tours, SDDC took the traveling group to the Shima building where the Dance Production class hosted their African-style dance exhibition. Among the performers in the dance were Santana and Tasha Henderson, the SDDC vice-club president and president of the Inter-Club Council. The last time the performers had rehearsed before the event was the Thursday the week prior, and the performers did not have warm-ups before dancing on the tour.
“In dance, you’re never good because there’s always something you can do better. There’s always something that you can improve on and there’s more to learn. You never stop learning in dance because within every day, we dance these new moves, new creations are being created,” said Henderson. “It’s not about becoming perfect … A dancer is always thinking about what they could’ve done better, what more they could have done. In a dancer’s mind, it’s always on a swivel.”
The students and guests then made their way to the Dolores Huerta plaza to see the Choreographed Hip-Hop workshop by the entrance of the Locke building. During the first tour, the traveling group united with a group of SDDC performers that stayed behind for practice, learning how to shuffle to Cupid’s “Cupid Shuffle” together. On both tours, the traveling group learned how to line dance to Cupid’s “Flex.”
The Choreographed Hip-Hop performances continued where the traveling group toured the Locke Center. At the Delta box office across from the entrance to the Warren Atherton Auditorium, SDDC performers danced to Chris Brown’s “Sensational.” On the first tour, the dancers also danced to the remix of Spyro’s “Who Is Your Guy?” featuring Tiwa Savage, while the exhibition danced to Missy Elliot’s “WTF” featuring Pharrell on the second tour. The choreography for “WTF” was considered a “fast and fun warm-up” for the Hip-Hop class that had not been rehearsed in weeks, and there were only two dancers who were not beginners in that set said Patricia Carter, a dance instructor at Delta.
At the end of each tour, the traveling group made their way to the parking lot of the Budd building for dances under the Afro-Carribean class, playing Tyla’s “Water” each time. The Afro-Carribean class held a workshop the first tour where multiple students and guests joined in, while the second tour was an exhibition where professors danced in front of the audience.
“After everything, that breath that once the music stops and you find yourself getting to … that breath of fresh air, that’s what I do it for. I feel like that breath of fresh air is just a reset of the body, of the mind,” said Henderson. “All this poster-making, handing posters, passing them out, walking around the school, dancing all the time, making new routines, being at school for six to eight hours on end … And then when you present that to an audience and they give you a round of applause, you feel like ‘everything I just did paid off. Like I finally [expletive] did it, I feel great,’ like it’s just a boost of confidence.”
The Discovery Dance tour succeeds the Annual Dance Workshop from three days prior on Oct. 26. The SDDC’s next major event will be their “Limitless” show that will be hosted from Nov. 15 to 16.
“Today, I can say that like maybe we made a lot of mistakes and not just one time, but both times. Which just goes to show it’s not that we made a mistake but that the fact that our choreography, and our critique and our techniques still needs more work,” said Henderson. “So now that we know that, we can go up there into the studio and put in that work to present a better show on the 15th and 16th.”
Correction: The name of the Inter-Club Council was incorrect in an earlier version of this story.
