Sleepy Hollow Dancers Bust A Move To Raise Money

TARRYTOWN, N.Y. – There was a lot of dancing taking place at the YMCA in Tarrytown on Saturday as performers in the Y Dance program got their groove on with a Dance-A-Thon to raise money for their annual March performance.

“We're going for four hours,” director Jane Alexandre said while explaining how dancers collected pledges for each hour or for the whole event. “We make them keep dancing somehow.”

Music was blaring in the YMCA's gym. Parents sat in chairs placed around the perimeter of the gym to watch their kids wiggle, dance and run around. Director Julie Johnson and the other professional dancers from Evolve Dance helped the kids keep dancing, making up games to break up the monotony and keep up morale.

The Dance-A-Thon was preceded by a holiday open house for the Y Dance Program.

Alexandre said the money raised would help cover costs for the program's March dance performance at the Music Hall.

“Our teaching philosophy is we're teaching performance, so we don't want to just show up and have the kids perform,” she said. “We go in for a full week and we teach them about the stage and about lighting and the sound and who the production people are so they can settle in and learn about the elements that go into a professional production. So that's expensive and most of our students wouldn't be able to pay the full amount.”

In addition to collecting pledges, several Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow businesses and residents donated items for a raffle, such as tickets to dance events in New York City.

Alexandre said the response to the event was “fantastic.”

“The response has been great because a lot of the time we don't want to ask—we can't ask our dancers for any more money,” she said. “We already know people are giving us all they can. So our dancers can dance, which they're really good at and they have fun at, and they have people supporting them.”

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