Dancing the night away

This past Saturday, a swashbuckling crowd gathered in Magnolia Ballroom for one of the dance parties of the year. The pirate-themed event full of games and eight hours of activities was put on by Dance Marathon. The event was a part of the Children’s Miracle Network and it happens every year to raise money for the Children’s Hospital in Macon.

Megan White, a senior nursing major, who holds the family relations position, has been the director for the past two years.

“This is our sixth year of holding the Dance Marathon at GCSU,” White said. “The first year there were only 35 participants and they raised $3,000. Then last year we had over 200 participants.”

The event for this year has proven to grow even more, with 300 girls signed up and around $22,000 donated. Every year the organization will buy something new for the Children’s Hospital, a few years ago it was a chemotherapy chair and this year the money will go to the radiology department.

“The actual event is like a party, it’s a celebration, that’s why the room is decorated,” White said. “This is a big celebration because the participants have to raise $50 in order to be here. No one person can take credit for this.”

The girls that attended took part in a variety of activities for an eight-hour period, competing in group competitions and learning a dance routine. Junior art history major Chelsea Oglesby was a part of the morale team, which involved decorating the ballroom, deciding on what games to play and choreographing the morale dance.

“The whole point is to stay on your feet for eight hours,” Oglesby said. “We do the morale dance, which is a dance that I made up and it’s a compilation of about sixteen different songs. Each little song has its own dance and throughout the eight-hour event, every hour on the hour, I teach two parts of it. So by the end of the day, there is a six-minute long dance that everybody knows.”

The girls participating got to wear pirate hats and eye patches and were awarded gold coins and such for different activities. The pirate theme, among many other things, was decided upon by members of the executive board, like Adam Gillhouse, who has been working with Dance Marathon for three years.

“It takes about a year’s worth of planning to create an event this big,” Gillhouse said. “It’s really exciting to see all of the people that come out and then at the end of the day, it’s really rewarding with how much money we raise knowing all that money goes directly to the hospital.”

There were six families from the Children’s Hospital that attended Dance Marathon that come to interact with the students and to show them the direct effect of their hard work.

“We build relationships with the people at the hospital and then with a lot of the families,” Gillhouse said. “One of the kids, Kristina Venable, passed away last year and her family is going to be here today. She was a really big part of the Dance Marathon family. Even though she has passed away, her family is still here to support us.”

In turn, the dancers participating got the chance to interact with the families and be there to support them.

“The greatest part about this event is just being here for the kids,” Gabby Mobley, a freshman nursing major, said. “With this we show them we can endure the eight hours of dancing and standing up for them because they have to endure so much every day.”

Posted by Joanna Sullivan on Mar 12 2010. Filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry