Students will have the opportunity to dance their pre-midterm blues away and develop a kinship with the community through line dancing.
Arts/West is collaborating with Kellea Tibbs to bring forth a new exercise routine to campus called Turnt & Burnt. It’s a monthly class scheduled to begin on Thursday at 6 p.m. Arts/West will charge $5 per person and $7 for two people, per class.
Tibbs, assistant director for campus relations at the Ohio University Alumni Association, will use line dancing as a recreational tool to engage people in exercise.
“I don’t think many people think of line dancing as fitness,” the former Zumba instructor said. “But it really works a lot of your body parts and gets your heart rate going.”
Line dancing is a choreographed dance routine where participants line up in a row and follow a sequence of music.
“Essentially it is dancing in a line,” Tibbs said. “(Everyone) moves in a rhythm to a particular song.”
“Once in a while, it’s important for students to de-stress,” Chelsa Morahan, the program specialist of Arts/West, said. “But it is much more important to de-stress in a healthy way.”
College can take a toll on students, Morahan said, and students often use the internet and other media platforms to unwind, which isn’t very effective.
Line dance is self-supporting and liberating, Tibbs said, but at the same time, it gives participants a feeling of connectedness with other dancers. The dance form doesn’t require a partner like most other traditional dance forms, but it does require cooperation and communication with the other participants.
Like every other phenomenon on the planet, line dancing is prone to change. Tibbs said it is constantly altering and evolving. Over the years, many different forms of line dancing have joined the club and rooted itself firmly in the landscape.
“Macarena is a latin line dance,” she said. “(It) became very popular during the 90s.”
Suzy Aftabizadeh, a freshman studying pre-medical studies, said students on campus find it difficult to maintain a healthy diet and lifestyle because of work and inaccessibility to nutritious food.
“Eating right becomes a difficult task,” she said. “(Students) generally don’t have the facilities to cook their own food and it’s easier to order in.”
For some students, Turnt & Burnt can be an entertaining opportunity to counter the problem.
“It’s much more fun than lifting weights, with the additional benefit of socializing,” Madison Tebics, a sophomore studying exercise physiology, said.
Gibbs said most of us are in the habit of making excuses when it comes to eating healthy and being fit.
“Fitness can be scheduled like every other activity,” she said. “If you get on the treadmill for 20 minutes, it’s going to make a difference more so than not doing it in the first place.”
