Pacific Index

Moving with Pacific’s Dance Club

Written by Megan Heinlen for MEDA 240

“Five, Six, Seven, Eight!”

The voice booms, immediately followed by squeaks of tennis shoes grappling for traction on the smooth Marley flooring. Arms flail everywhere, and heavy breathing mixes with the sounds of Brittney Spears. Of the sixteen people crammed together in Warner 104 Dance Studio, maybe one quarter are dance majors; everyone else is simply there to experience the joy and movement of dance.

After many years without a Dance Club, Pacific student Arianna Inciarte finally reworked and restarted the club, kicking off with a bang in the spring of 2025, hosting a Bachata class in collaboration with Spanish Club. Since then, the club has hosted many more events and classes, including a beginner Salsa Night, complete with tons and tons of chips and salsa; the most recent event consisted of a hip hop class taught by Lily Gardner where students learned some basic party tricks and a short but sweet dance combination.

Dance has a plethora of health benefits for adolescents, especially students, including stress relief, coordination, and improving cognitive functions. Through fun events, this club is not only advocating for dance, but benefiting the student population. A recent study from the National Library of Medicine goes in-depth into the health benefits of dance. Most notable of these was the improvements on anxiety and depression in young adults. They had subjects take 12 weeks of dance movement therapy and evaluated their mental health throughout. “Dance movement therapy demonstrated positive improvements in the symptoms such as somatization, obsessive-compulsive disorder, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anxiety, hostility, paranoid ideation, and psychoticism,” the report stated—which is simply a big fancy way of saying that dance makes the brain happy.

Although the emotional benefits of participating in dance are incredible, they’re almost nothing compared to the effect it has on cognitive health. Dancing exercises cognitive functions, like knowledge, memory, judgment, and understanding; ultimately causing improvement in memory retention and problem solving. The National Library of Medicine found that “in addition to the benefits of dance enhancing executive function, dance has been shown to be advantageous in the development of convergent thinking. Convergent thinking is associated with the process of solving problems and finding a solution to a problem.”

All these benefits of dancing are fantastic. However, they aren’t the reason Inciarte started this club.

“The dance club started with the idea of providing a space for people who do not consider themselves professional dancers but find joy in dancing,” Inciarte explained. “Having a space where you don’t need to have prior dance experience, you can just explore dance and its different styles. As well as embracing cultural dances and distinct interests.” She added, “Come have fun with us; it’s way less scary than you think.”