LEWISTON — In the summer of 1994, Jane Weiner was asked to spend a couple days a week teaching dance to kids downtown. At the time, Weiner was a dancer with Doug Elkins Dance Company and doing an artist residency at the Bates Dance Festival. 

Though Weiner had a background in education, she was more focused on performing at the time. She agreed to teach, but when more kids than she knew what to do with showed up on the first day, she questioned her judgment. Little did she know the experience would be the beginnings of what she later called her “life’s calling.”

At the end of three weeks of teaching, the students put on a performance where Sara Sweet-Rabidoux Kelsey and Rosemary Leach were in the audience. Both were recent college graduates participating in the dance festival. 

“A lightning bolt struck us simultaneously and we said: ‘That’s what we want to do,’” Sweet-Rabidoux Kelsey remembered about watching the final performance. 

That performance would turn out to be a serendipitous meeting for Weiner, Sweet-Rabidoux Kelsey and Leach, who that day began planting the seeds of the Bates Youth Arts Program. The following year, the program officially began.

Today, the Bates Youth Arts Program is a community outreach component of the annual Bates Dance Festival. Each year, dozens of local children ages 7-16 get dance, music and theater training surrounded by the hundreds of professional dancers, educators and college students from around the world who gather for three weeks to teach, create and perform at the festival.

This summer marks the program’s 30th year.

The idea to connect the dance festival with the Lewiston and Auburn communities was a “no-brainer,” said Laura Faure, who was director of Bates Dance Festival at that time. She recalled it was a time when a “town and gown” negative relationship had developed between the college and the two cities. 

The co-founders today view the program as an important factor in mending the relationship between Bates and the communities. “At first, parents were like, ‘Oh wait, this is something Bates is doing; we don’t want anything to do with it,’” Sweet-Rabidoux Kelsey said. 

“Because of our dependency and consistency, we (earned) the trust of the community … and then we got more inroads to the community. … We made a little bridge there, like a restorative web of some kind,” she explained.

Over the years, the program has changed its offerings and forms. It began by simply teaching music and contemporary dance for a half-day about three days a week for three weeks, culminating in a final performance at the end of the Bates Dance Festival. It eventually evolved into a full-day program, five days a week, throughout the three-week dance festival, offering hip hop and African fusion dance styles as well as music, theater, visual art and writing, with its own, separate performance at the end.

“The first couple years we were just experimenting,” Weiner said.

“It evolved very organically,” Faure added. 

After drop-off in the morning, the different age groups — Littles, Middles and Teens — split up to go to their dance and music classes. They eat lunch in Commons Dining Hall and then begin their afternoon theater, composition and art classes.

Though kids arts skills vary, their eagerness to learn is undeniable. On Wednesday, in a hip hop class for the Middles taught by Hector Cisneros in Bates’ Benjamin Mays Center, students were excited to learn top rock movements — the first steps of a hip hop routine. 

Cisneros is a Houston-based Venezuelan dancer who competes in the national breakdancing circuit and teaches locally. As soon as he demonstrated a movement, kids began to mimic him, testing it out in their space on the floor. 

This is Cisneros’ first time at Bates Dance Festival. He said that although the kids on the first day were shy, as they’ve worked together they started to open up. “It’s a process,” he said. 

As he introduced more complex steps and movements, he reminded the kids to “be gentle” with themselves and to “give yourself some grace” as they were learning.

It’s this kind of encouragement, said Terrence Karn, co-director of YAP and the program’s music director, that helps kids through the frustration that can accompany learning new skills. He added that assistants and teachers will gently approach those students who need extra help, trying to see how they can reframe a concept to help them best understand it.

Since the program’s inception, kids have regularly returned year after year to participate in the program. “One of the indicators that the program was successful, needed and appreciated,” Faure said, “was that, very typically, if a kid came at 7 they stayed until they were 16 and then they didn’t want to leave.”

Amelia Campbell, 10, of Lewiston is experiencing her first year of the program. So far, she said, “It’s pretty fun, but tiring.” Through the camp, she has started to do theater, which has quickly become her favorite class.

Most campers this year are returners, Karn said. Beowulf Currier, 12, of Lewiston is back for his fourth year. He said he especially enjoys “learning all the dances from all the teachers,” with hip hop being his favorite. 

Anika Salazar, 14, also from Lewiston, has returned for her ninth year. She said she most enjoys the community at YAP.

Rob Flax, the music instructor who has returned for his 15th year, added that because kids are so eager to be back and to learn, there is a certain ease in classes.

“I call this vacation teaching,” he said. “I’m rekindling a flame that’s already lit.”

Such fondness for the camp extends beyond the years that students can participate in it. According to Karn, a number of students and interns have gone on to teach or stay involved in the camp. 

Dana Reed, former YAP director, began as an intern with YAP in 2002 after attending the dance festival in 2001. She was hired as a teacher in 2003 and director in 2007. 

Molly Brown, assistant house manager for the Bates Dance Festival this year, joined YAP when she was 6. She said her mother, a Bates College alumna, had signed her up. She participated in the program almost every year until she was 17 and returned as an intern in 2023 and 2024. 

The program remains a source of inspiration and community for Brown, who recently graduated from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts with a degree in dance. She said her decision to switch majors from international relations to dance was solidified by returning to the Bates Dance Festival in the summer. 

She explained that the community of support and belonging at Bates YAP helped foster her love of dance. 

“One of the things that I liked about dance growing up was the community that you have with it,” she said. “I don’t think I ever felt like I was isolated when I was at Bates and I always had someone that I could hang out with and talk with, and so I think that really helped.”

“I think that Bates Dance Festival is probably one of the most diverse and accepting dance programs and places that I’ve been to,” she added. 

This sense of community and connection is shared among students and staff. Leach, one of the co-founders, attributed the continuation of the program over 30 years to the strong community built there. 

“The human connections that we made in those three weeks are one of the things that has kept it going,” Leach said. 

Reed, along with the program’s co-founders, agreed that it’s this sense of community that helps students feel safe in the program and ultimately allows them to open up. Weiner said that consistently, by the third week of the program some kids will confide in the program faculty “really scary things that had happened to them” in their lives. 

“That’s the power of the arts,” she said. “That’s the power of consistency.”

Reed recalled one student who, over the years, was becoming emancipated from her parents. The former director recounted how the faculty helped the student find a job at the Bates College dining hall and helped her open a bank account.

“It was little things,” Reed said. She said the more the staff learns about students’ lives, they will do what they can to help them. 

“We can do only what we can do. We can’t solve the problem. … But you can take the steps that you can to ensure that this child is going to eventually be in the safest place that they can.”

Reflecting on the 30 years they have been part of the program, the co-founders and past and current directors shared a sense of gratitude and hope. 

“To me, it’s a triumph,” Sweet Rabidoux-Kelsey said. “It is a triumph and it’s a positive thing.” 

“I hope that something that we’ve done has rippled out into the vibrations and made somebody hopeful or thankful or excited about themselves, about a future, about possibilities,” she added. 

“I’m very thankful to be part of this program and help it grow (and) watch it grow. … I grow with the program. I think I learn every year. I learn from the students, even the youngest ones,” Karn added. 

To commemorate its 30th year, YAP is hosting a public celebration Aug. 2 at the L/A Arts center at 168 Lisbon St. in Lewiston. Mayor Carl Sheline has also declared Aug. 1 Bates Youth Arts Program Day in Lewiston.

The program runs from July 14 to Aug. 1. The YAP final performance will take place in Alumni Gym on Aug. 1 at 5 p.m. The event is free and open to the public, but attendees must RSVP.

More information about the Bates Dance Festival and this year’s performance schedule can be found online.