Who we are
A student-run competitive and social ballroom team at Brown, open to Brown and RISD students at every level, including none at all.
How the team started
The team began around 1993, when eight Brown students decided they wanted to learn to dance. Nobody knew whom to ask, so they put out a public call for an instructor and found one: a German dancer who said he had competed successfully, and who pointed them towards the International Dancesport Festival in Weymouth, England. A few weeks before the festival’s week-long camp, the eight went to a local dance to show what they had learned. Christina Cryan, a former United States Latin champion, happened to be there. She liked their enthusiasm a good deal more than their technique, and coached them on the basics before they left.
Back from England, the students held auditions for the team’s first coach, and Christina won the job easily. The team hosted the first Brown Ballroom Dance Competition in 1994, and from 1995 it grew fast, from eight members to 125 at its height by 1998, competing up and down the East Coast. In 2000, as Christina’s breast cancer worsened, her friend Russell Monk, a former British and Scottish champion, began teaching when she could not. That same year she set up an endowment for future dancers, and when she died in 2002 she left the team a generous gift. The fund now carries her name, the Christina Cryan Endowed Ballroom Dance Fund. Russell stayed on as coach after her death, and Christine Harvey became the team’s full-time coach in 2012.
[Where the team is now, in a paragraph: its size today, when Randy Deats and Kathy St Jean took over the coaching, and whether the Christina Cryan fund is still running.]
[what and when]
“Ballroom for me has changed the trajectory of my career, where I’ve found my closest friends and my partner — my future aspirations are shaped by it. It has taught me how to find beauty through movement, self expression, and the freedom to be truly myself.”
Along the way
How we run things
The beginners’ lesson comes first
Every argument about rooms, money or scheduling ends at the same question: does this keep that room easy to walk into?
Anyone leads, anyone follows
Most of the team does both. You are never put in a role you did not pick, and you can change your mind halfway through a lesson.
We compete without taking ourselves seriously
The floor gets our full attention. The rest of a competition is six hours on a gym floor waiting for your heat, which is where most people end up making friends.
Nobody is priced out
Dues get waived and costumes get lent, without anyone having to explain themselves. The practical detail is on the Join page.
Who teaches us
Weekly lessons are run by Kathy St Jean and Randy Deats, certified championship ballroom judges and co-directors of the Providence studio The Dancing Feeling.
Once a BBDT dancer
Alumni come back for showcases, judge them, and keep the team going when entry fees outrun dues. If you danced here, we would like to hear from you.