It’s a Monday night at the Veterans Memorial Building, a 1927 Beaux-Arts building owned by the City of Oakland that hosts events for seniors, dance groups, and a queer choir.
The Explore West Coast Swing dance group, started in 2022 by Tim Kenny and Riley Crozier, holds weekly classes. At this past Monday’s class, 30 dancers of various ages and ethnic backgrounds were practicing their footwork at the ballroom. The participants took turns dancing with one another while listening attentively to instructor Riley Crozier go over footwork.
“Step, tap, step, touch,” they tell the class as their voice resonates inside the Art Deco ballroom. “The best feeling as a teacher is to see a bunch of relaxed bodies to the tune of 5, 6, 7, 8.”
Just before the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, the dance programming at the Veterans Memorial Building almost shut down. In late 2019, dancers who were renting space at the building were notified by the City that the master tenant facilitating dance spaces, a nonprofit called Lake Merritt Dance Center, had decided to step down. The dance programming would need to be shut down unless another nonprofit stepped forward to be the point of contact between the City of Oakland and the several dance companies needing space to hold their classes.
That’s when a group of dancers, including Robert Friedman, who, along with his husband, Shin Aoki, started SwingOut West Coast Swing for the LGBTQ+ and friends in 2012 and was already renting space for their class, formed the Lake Merritt Dance Organizers Foundation. The founding group also included Cheryl Rosenthal, who is behind Texas Rose, a women’s trans-inclusive dance community.
Lake Merritt Dance, not to be confused with its predecessor, Lake Merritt Dance Center, has carried on the same mission, emphasizing offering space to LGBTQ+ dance groups. Explore West Coast Swing, Starlight Strut, a Queer country western dance group for women, non-binary and trans people, SwingOut, and Texas Rose, are the LGBTQ+ dance groups part of Lake Merritt Dance. The current dance groups include non-LGBTQ+, including bachata, country western dance, West Coast swing, Cuban salsa, and many others.
Friedman said that although each dance company pays rent, it is not enough to cover the organization’s expenses, including paying an administrative assistant to handle invoices and other tasks. To raise more funding, the Swing and LGBTQ+ dance groups put together an event every one to two years. So far, Lake Merritt Dance has hosted six, three Swing, and three LGBTQ+, all named after songs, with the next one on Saturday, March 23.
SwingOut, Starlight Strut, and Explore West Coast Swing are hosting You Should Be Dancing. Sundance Saloon, a San Francisco organization not part of Lake Merritt Dance, is joining the dancing fun for a good cause.
However, the foundation’s early days were precarious, and adding tenants and programming took longer than expected.
“Frankly, we didn’t know how we were going to pull it off because there was no funding from the predecessor organization,” Friedman said. “Many of the groups decided to continue but not all of them. And so we just really had no idea how we were going to do it.”
By January 2020, Lake Merritt Dance had everything in place to start fundraising and recruiting new dance companies seeking rental space. However, Lake Merritt Dance’s ambitious desire to continue with dancing classes at the Veterans Memorial Building was short-lived when the organization had to halt all operations on March 14, 2020. It wouldn’t be until August 2022 when dancing resumed at the building, which includes three halls, a lounge, office spaces, and a ballroom where most dance classes happen.
The Oakland Veterans Memorial Building, designed by Henry H. Meyers, is one of 10 constructed in Alameda County to honor soldiers who had returned from World War I.
“It was tough coming back,” Friedman said. “We lost around 40% of our dance groups and had to work really hard to find ones to replace them. Not everybody was on the same page in terms of masking requirements.”
Friedman said it has been a continuous process to bring the community’s attention back to dancing. “Some people still have health concerns, other people don’t dance anymore or they developed other hobbies during the pandemic,” he said.
Although masking in Alameda County is no longer required, Explore West Coast Swing’s Monday classes still require proof of vaccination and a high-filtration mask like a KF94, KN95, or N95.
Lake Merritt Dance currently facilitates renting space to 12 dance groups and a Queer Choir. Friedman said having three to four more dance groups would be ideal.
Although the fundraiser is named after a Bee Gees song, expect less disco dancing and lots of two-step, West Coast swing, waltz, and line dancing.
Correction: Lake Merritt Dance houses five LGBTQ+ groups.
