Dance has always been an essential part of my life — the axis everything else revolved around. Rehearsals took up weeknights and Saturdays through middle and high school, and were the sites of my closest friendships. I sometimes struggled to deal with the demands dance brought on, with long hours and problematic physical expectations weighed against the joys of a great performance.
College presented a crossroads: I could either move on from dance entirely or make the deliberate choice to keep it as a part of this new chapter of my life. I decided to audition for Modernextension Dance Company and have found a strong community there ever since.
The dance community at UNC is diverse, vibrant and encouraging. There are over 20 student organizations on campus dedicated to different techniques, experience levels and performances. With total membership for these groups around 3,000, it is clear that students support dance at UNC in a real and significant way.
The real question is how much UNC supports it.
Last spring, I enrolled in Exercise and Sport Science 30: Advanced Ballet with professor James Strong, one of two dance classes offered for that year. In the final hours of the term, after many of us had already re-enrolled in the course for the following fall semester, students received a short email informing us that the course would be cancelled due to “unforeseen circumstances."
Even worse, it was the students who delivered the news to our professor, not knowing he hadn’t been informed that his classes, and therefore his job at UNC, were abruptly gone. For fall 2024, James offered a pay-per-class system at CURRENT ArtSpace + Studio which was attended by many former students of Advanced Ballet, but the space was not available to continue into the spring of 2025.
UNC has no dance major or minor, and there are currently just two intro-level modern and jazz dance classes on the registrar which will not be offered again this fall. Many schools within the UNC System — including N.C. State, N.C. A&T, Appalachian State and UNC Charlotte — have robust programs offering classes in dance technique, history and performance from around the world. In the past few years, UNC has offered a limited selection of dance classes through the exercise science department, but even those have not been supported in the long run.
The University has also neglected the dance spaces necessary for student organizations to function. Woollen Gym’s primary studio was converted into a mechanical room to store an HVAC unit during a project to create a new practice space for the women’s basketball team. The new room is smaller than the old studio, making it difficult to accommodate large companies like Blank Canvas, which has over 250 members and can have up to 60 people in a single piece. The other room available, previously a rowing practice area, is now used as a dance space despite multiple shortcomings. If the University cannot provide an academic opportunity to explore dance, adequate support for student extracurricular groups trying to fill that hole is the least they can do.
College is a chance to reexamine those extracurriculars and classes from high school in a new light, to work out how they fit into this new page of your education. UNC has a flourishing arts community but doesn’t give the same consideration to dance. Arts and humanities programs are first on the chopping block for cutting costs; dance is merely an extension of this injustice.
