Dance Fusion holds free dance workshops in Fremont for Bay Area community

By Staff Writers Felicity He & Lucas Zhang

For Dance Fusion Vice President Senior Jasmine Li, dance has always been a huge part of her life. She has demonstrated this passion on stage during Homecoming Week and the Multicultural Assembly and has always aimed to spread her love of such an art form in her community. The high prices for dance classes drove her to join forces with fellow high schoolers and other locals from the Bay Area to establish Dance Fusion. “I think challenging price barriers is important in any extracurricular activity. And for me, that was dance,” Li said.

Dance Fusion is an offshoot of Eternity Band, a Bay Area student band and volunteer organization that offers free workshops to the public in various dance genres, with options ranging from hip-hop and jazz to K-pop and Latin dance. In a typical 90-minute workshop, one of the organization’s student instructors opens the lesson with 30 minutes of cardio before teaching a self-choreographed combination. 

Dance Fusion started off with weekly workshops at Central Park known as “Dance in the Park,” but it has since expanded to workshops by getting sponsorships with local businesses, including Nature’s Organic Ice Cream and Mr. Sun Tea Fremont. These collaborations have allowed Dance Fusion to rent out indoor venues to help the organization to combat low turnout at outdoor venues during colder months. Their most recent collaboration took them to Rise Martial Arts, where they held their hip-hop workshops from April 19 to May 10. 

Aside from dance, Dance Fusion also hosts one-time special guest workshops featuring other forms of exercise like pilates, modeling, kung fu, and yoga. “I’m proud of the amount of people that we’ve been able to teach … it’s a very diverse range of people, from two-year-olds to Asian grandmas,” Li said.

In the future, Dance Fusion hopes to expand the reach of its programs beyond the Bay Area. Such projects would be similar to the semester-long program they hosted with California School for the Deaf (CSD), in which Dance Fusion taught a hip-hop and Latin dance workshop to 15 students and faculty members. 

Li recalls one class at the CSD program during which the students taught the instructors a line dance called the Church Clap. In return, the instructors taught the students a line dance that they are unfamiliar with before the lesson during the following session. “That experience was very rewarding … the exchange of dancing was very fun and insightful,” Li said.

Dance Fusion instructors learn to appreciate their own progress and passion for dancing by teaching classes. Li recalls teaching her first hip-hop class and going in not confident about her skill in that genre but ending up witnessing students excited while practicing the choreography she had spent hours arranging. “I think that made me feel better about my skill level, even as a teacher,” Li said.

As time slips away to summer, the instructors at Dance Fusion hope to return to their roots dancing at Central Park, hopefully attracting more community members to join them. “I hope that people are more inclined to want to try dance … I just want everyone in general to be unafraid of trying something new,” Li said.