This past Saturday, April 12, Deerfield hosted an interschool dance at the Pearl Street Club in Northampton, Massachusetts. Choate was one of the thirty schools in attendance.
In the original plan, the dance would only have been open to CALSA members. However, a week before the event, the SAC decided to open up the event to the whole school because of the volume of interest. In the end, though, only about thirty Choate students attended the dance.
The Pearl Street Club is a building comprising a concert hall on the first floor and a dance club on top, but it mostly looks like an old concert venue. DJ G Money and his Street team provided the music for the evening. They played not only a selection classic party anthems but also a lot of Jamaican and reggaeton music that they mixed into the play list. The music created a fluid vibe, which helped to dissipate the initial divisions among the schools. By the end of the night, no one could even distinguish individual students—let alone schools—the dance floor became one liquid mass of sweat and movement.
On the stage, the DJ G Money and his Street Team held a series of dancing contests. The prizes were CDs that they had made. One popular contest was the “Crank Dat competition,” in which kids did different versions of the Crank Dat dance. There was also a dance-off initiated by the students. Malik Ben-Sahhadin ’09, notorious at Choate for his dance moves, broke it down with a boy from another school, who challenged Malik with a flex dance, basically a series of body contortions.
After the competitions were over, people stayed on the stage as the DJs started to play a mix of international music. This is where the dancing really began in earnest. However, with all the jumping and grinding, it became quite warm within the club, and kids started getting pushy. There were several other complaints from Choate students, among them that DJ G Money always stopped the songs too early and that the food provided by Deerfield ran out too quickly. However, all in all, the interschool dance was a success, if only because it gave Choate students a chance to break out of the monotony that can sometimes plague weekends at Choate.
Mr. Jim Yanelli, Roy Collins ’09, and Miguel Vargas ’09 organized the event on the Choate end.
