KAADATT Spreads to College Campuses

Since its creation at Macalester last year, the student organization Kids All About Dancing All the Time (KAADATT) has since spread to Harvard University, Duke University, and the North Carolina School of the Arts.

KAADATT member Carolyn Fryberger ’07 worked at a summer camp in North Carolina this past summer, where she told friends about the club. Some liked the idea so much that they decided to start chapters at their own schools.

Duke University’s daily newspaper, The Chronicle, quickly picked up on the KAADATT story. “It’s funny that the paper reported on it so quickly at Duke and they saw it as news,” Fryberger said. “There it is considered a real event, and here, nobody noticed.”

Patrick Robbins ’07 founded KAADATT with several other friends last year. “We created it in response to a dead weekend scene at Mac; it’s always the same reggae party in someone’s room,” Robbins said. “We wanted to create parties you wish you could go to, where there is just a lot of dancing,” he said.

“It started out as geurilla dancing, but now we put on actual dances, as opposed to dancing in random public places,” Fryberger said.

Spontaneous KAADATT dance parties, accompanied by music from a boom box, were more common last year.

Fryberger described one such impromptu party: “We started outside of the campus center with our little stereo, then moved to the median of the road to dance,” she said. “Then a fire alarm went off in Doty, bringing fire trucks with all their flashing lights, so we danced in the fire truck lights with the alarm going off in the background. Beautiful.”

KAADATT has sponsored one organized dance in the Dupre basement so far this semester. Robbins said he hopes to bring back more spontaneous dances this year.

“It’s just a fun thing to do,” Robbins said. “There are always different types of music. There is something cool about each dance. One time, we had Twister. During another, some kids came out in aprons and served milk and cookies at intermission. Anything you want to do [at the dances], you can do,” Robbins said.

The Duke KAADATT differs from the Macalester incarnation in that the Duke group has rules. “That isn’t the Mac KAADATT way,” Robbins said. “We don’t have a central government, we just do things by consensus. We do what we damn well please.”

-Brief written by Contributing Writer Amy Lieberman
 

Students Recycle Spanish Books for Latin America

A group of six first-years took matters into their own hands after discovering that the organization Books for Africa was planning to recycle 250 donated books written in Spanish.

Books for Africa, a national organization that has shipped almost 10 million new and used books to 23 African countries, is the largest transporter of books to the African continent.

While volunteering for Books for Africa during Into the Streets, a first-year orientation activity, Pierangelo Rossi ’08 and several other students discovered boxes of books—mostly brand new textbooks—headed for the recycling bins.

Books for Africa turned its surplus over to the Macalester students because it had no need for the Spanish texts.

“We couldn’t just let them recycle the books,” Rossi said.

Over the next few weeks, the students collected and sorted well over 250 new and used texts and are currently arranging for them to be shipped to Bogota, Colombia, where the father of organizer Kristie Barber ’08 works for Pedro Santandes Oil. The oil company has agreed to pay to ship the 800 pounds of textbooks and said it will distribute them to local high schools upon arrival.

-Brief written by Contributing Writer Tara Williams