News from Groove With Me:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 12, 2005

GROOVE WITH ME
Free Dance School Summer Recital
Girls Discover Their Own Self Worth

New York, NY: East Harlem’s free dance school Groove With Me presents the summer program on Monday August 15th at 6:30 pm in Central Park’s Harlem Meer – entrance 110th and 5th. Seventy girls will take the stage to display vast improvements in jazz, hip hop, ballet and Afro-Cuban. Most importantly they will demonstrate an increased sense of self and self confidence.

Groove With Me’s mission is to engage girls with free and accessible dance classes, as an alternative to negative behavior and to prevent destructive choices by building self-esteem and other achievement skills. The summer program collaborates with the Association to Benefit Children’s Echo Park Summer Program, to give girls (and their counselors) a respite from the pool and arts-n-crafts. Many teenagers come every afternoon for two hours, receiving intensive dance training in different styles, and developing friendships and belonging.

One class explored self identity from more angles than dance alone. The “Who Am I?” curriculum utilizes drama exercises, journaling, spoken word, poetry, video portraits, photo portraits, and discussion to further explore the girls’ self image. This summer the focus was on images of women in hip hop lyrics and videos. The intention of the instructors was to spark ideas of ways the girls could protect themselves from absorbing and believing the messages – that women are for sex alone, that money is the most important thing, that women can be bought, that men can talk to women a certain way. Remarkably the girls were ready to take it one step further and change the way things are now! They have created a video with their thoughts as voice over to send to the music video t.v. stations.

Groove With Me, Inc., founded in 1996 by Abigail Rosin, began with two students at Loisaida, Inc., a community center on the Lower East Side. In 2001 it acquired its own dance studio in Spanish Harlem and quadrupled to serve 160 children. With a social worker Program Director at the helm today it serves 220 girls a year with 21 volunteer teachers.

This fall Groove With Me will be honored by The Harlequin More Than Words Award, a segment on CBS’s new show Real Simple, and a workshop in the studio by Savion Glover.

For more information, visit www.groovewithme.org or contact Abigail Rosin at 917-514-7171.

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