Final preparations were underway for the 13th annual Dance Parade, which sends about 10,000 dancers spinning, leaping, stomping, roller-skating, stilt walking, cartwheeling and otherwise grooving past Union Square and through the East Village each spring.
Dance Parade Inc., founded in 2007, is a nonprofit that brings educational programs to schools and senior centers year-round. But its largest event by far is this parade, which culminates in an afternoon of performances at Tompkins Square Park.
According to the organization’s website, this year’s procession, under the theme “Movement of the People,” included 165 groups performing more than 100 styles of dance. Hip-hop dancers followed Scottish Highland dancers, who followed classical Indian, Chinese folk and Brazilian samba dancers along the sun-drenched streets.
“This year we’re looking at immigrant rights and countering a lot of negativity about walls and immigration and closing the border,” Greg Miller, Dance Parade’s executive director, said. The event opened with a Native American circle dance presided over by Louis Mofsie, leader of the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers and one of four grand marshals (along with DJ Dara, Baayork Lee and Bill T. Jones). A banner on the float carrying Mofsie, at the front of the parade, stated: “When we honor Native American dance, we acknowledge that we are all immigrants.”
Promoting cross-cultural unity has long been a focus of the parade, which began in response to New York’s antiquated Cabaret Law. (The selectively enforced law, which had placed restrictions on social dancing since 1926, was repealed in 2017, in part because of Dance Parade’s advocacy.) In a 2006 case that challenged the law, the state Supreme Court ruled, as Miller said, that “basically social dancing wasn’t expressive enough to be protected by the First Amendment.” The parade’s founders wanted to refute that idea by displaying style after style of unequivocally expressive dance.
From about 30 dance forms that first year, the array has expanded, with many troupes returning as newcomers join. Mariela Jimenez, visiting from Virginia with a branch of Bolivian group Tinkus San Simón, said she has participated since 2011 as a way to share her culture with a wider audience.
Referring to the Carnaval de Oruro in Bolivia, she said: “Not everybody has a chance to go over there to experience the energy and the folklore. So we bring that here.”
Tamara Bejar, who leads Pacific islands dance troupe Lei Pasifika, sees the parade as an opportunity for her students to show off their hip-swiveling moves, “a goal at the end of the semester,” she said — and it happens to fall during Asian Pacific Heritage Month.
While some groups perform intermittently along the parade route, others make a point of dancing as much as possible.
“My dancers are probably like, ‘I wish she wouldn’t be so hard on us,’ ” said Andrea Beeman, founder of the Dancing Rubies, whose members belly danced through Astor Place to the rhythm of their own finger cymbals. “But people are there to see us dance, not walk in pants, so we try to dance for them.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.