There’s something special happening every Friday night at a dance studio in Quincy.
“When I was young, I thought I couldn’t prove myself to be a great ballerina, until a wise person told me: Believe in yourself to be the perfect dancer you are!”
It’s called Me Too — an inclusive program at the In Sync Center of the Arts that invites children and young adults with special needs to dance, connect and shine. And the results go beyond choreography. The benefits of dance run deep, especially for kids with special needs, helping them build strength, confidence and meaningful connection.
Now in its 19th year, Me Too blends movement, self-expression, friendship, and, of course, joy. As we mark Disability Awareness Month this July and the 35th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, we’re celebrating the inclusive dance program on this week’s Joy Beat.
Amy Enos, founding teacher and director of Me Too, joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath in-studio to share more about the program. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: Take us back to the beginning. What inspired the start of this program?
Amy Enos: We have students who have needs that we wanted to make sure we could accommodate, and we did not want to turn any child away from having them join our dance class.
So, myself and Teri Mangiaratti, who is the owner of In Sync Center of the Arts, collaborated and brainstormed and figured out how we could incorporate these kids into our classes, whether it was into the mainstream dance classes that we have every week, or if it would be better to have a program where we could actually make sure that they were having their needs fulfilled.
If it’s like a one-on-one situation, we wanted to make sure that we could accommodate them because, again, we don’t want to ever turn any child away from dance class. So, that’s where it all started, and now, here we are!
Rath: That’s so interesting because I was going to ask — using dance as therapy right now is well-known. Twenty years ago, it wasn’t really a thing, so you started this just wanting to be able to have special needs kids be able to dance. Simple as that.
Enos: Absolutely. If dance therapy were a popular thing back then, I probably would have been a dance therapist.
Rath: Tell us how it evolved, then, starting basically from scratch, because there was not a template for that.
Enos: There wasn’t. We had a couple of kids sprinkled through the dance studio, and we realized quickly that those kids needed a little bit more attention to be able to be successful in a class. So, we decided that we were going to try and see what happens.
I was taking my experience from early childhood education and my experience working with children, and Miss Teri took her experience with child psychology that she has, and her experience being in the field, and we just figured it out. We have a mom, actually, of one of our students who is an occupational therapist, and we asked her if she wouldn’t mind to kind of help us, and we put it all together.
A lot of trial and error, I will tell you that, in the beginning.
Rath: Wow. But not coming into it totally cold because you’re all experts in your respective fields, even though, again, this wasn’t a thing at the time.
Enos: Absolutely, absolutely.
Rath: Tell us how the class looks now. What does a typical Friday night look like?
Enos: Oh my goodness, yes! So, we actually have two classes now because we have such a need for it. We have one class that is for younger children, and the second class is for older children, teens and young adults.
It’s pretty much a party on Fridays. We get together, and we call it the dance party. It’s more than just dance — it’s a lot of socializing, making friends, learning how to do structure and a lot of gross motor activities. For the younger class, sometimes some of the students have their occupational therapist or their [Applied Behavioral Analyst] join them in the class, which is helpful because that way, we can, in real time, know what they’re working on so we can support that.
But during the class, the structure stays the same for them because a lot of times, children, in general, feed on that structure. We start with a warmup. It’s always, you know, follow-along-the-words songs. And then, we do some stretching, and it’s a lot of musical instruments we incorporate in the class. Egg shakers are the favorite — I’ll tell you, they love those egg shakers.
Rath: Egg shakers are awesome.
Enos: They sure are. They make a fun noise. We do follow the kids’ interests, so like right now, we have a student who is very interested in vehicles and construction vehicles, so a lot of times we will incorporate that into the class, and we’ll make sure we do a construction vehicle song to dance along to.
We actually learn a routine that they perform at the end of the year recital, so we practice every week, and then they go on stage, and they perform it. It is amazing.
Rath: For a teacher of any type, I know one of the joys is watching the kids develop and learn. I’ve got to imagine you’ve had some amazing experiences with these kids.
Enos: I really have. Currently, I have students in the young adult portion of the class that I have had since they were two. Now, they are 18 or 19, and I’m watching them graduate from high school, go to college, and just become an adult from being a child.
What they’ve developed all through those years is incredible. It’s incredible to watch them go from nonverbal to having a full-on back-and-forth conversation, to friending me on Instagram, you know, things like that.
Rath: It must be just unbelievable seeing at the recital an 18-year-old who’s going to be going off to college.
Enos: Yes, yes. We have students who have graduated, and they are still dancing with us on Friday nights. We actually have a couple of students who are now interns — meaning that they are helping with the younger Me Too class.
Rath: Aww, that’s awesome!
Enos: Isn’t that great? So yeah, there are a lot of things, a lot of special things that go into this program.
Rath: I have to think you must have heard a lot of appreciative words from parents as well, to be able to have this for their kids.
Enos: Yes, and I’m not sure why, but there aren’t a lot of programs like this that mimic a typical class that a child can do, like a once-a-week dance class. There’s not much out there, believe it or not. I don’t know why, but there’s not.
Rath: That’s surprising.
Enos: Yes, so we have parents traveling over 30 minutes just for 45 minutes with us, once a week. I don’t take that for granted; I understand what that takes as a parent myself. That’s huge.
Rath: Yeah, this does need to spread farther because you’re really a part of a movement, right, that’s advocating for this kind of inclusivity and visibility for people in the arts.
Enos: Yes, we try our hardest to make sure that people know, and people are aware [of the classes]. The families are great as well, because of a lot of word of mouth. We have a lot of students who come in because their parents are friends with other families who are in need of a class like that.
Rath: In a shared space, there must be amazing interactions between and among the students.
Enos: There is, there is. There’s something to be said about setting that precedent of “we welcome everybody.” For all of the children throughout the studio — including my own daughter, who takes classes there — it’s something to be said about that being normalized, to know that this is accepted and to not even second-guess it. We don’t even question it anymore. There’s no questioning.
If you’d like to nominate someone or something for the Joy Beat, leave us a voicemail at (617) 300-BEAT [2328].
