A Summer of Radical Joy
By Dorian Cohen, National Program Manager
I have spent a lot of my life trying to find the right word for what happens in a room when young people are dancing full out, present, unguarded. I've called it catharsis. I've called it healing. I've called it revolutionary. But this summer, watching our work unfold across four cities at once, the word that kept surfacing was simpler than all of that: joy.
Not the easy, decorative kind. The kind that takes work to build and courage to protect. The kind that shows up when a student who used to sit out finally steps into the circle, when a teaching artist who has been pouring into a program for years watches a former student teach their first class, when a whole community gathers in a park to celebrate an art form that was, not so long ago, dismissed as something to outgrow. That is the joy I want to tell you about. It moved through Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Santa Barbara this spring and summer, and it looked a little different in each place, but it was unmistakably the same thread.
Los Angeles: Building the Pipeline
Los Angeles this year has been about depth as much as reach. Our partnership with Glendale Unified School District kept teaching artists moving through 15 school sites from January through June, meeting our youngest students, some as young as transitional kindergarten, right where they are, building rhythm, confidence, and self-expression into their earliest school memories. That same spirit of showing up consistently carried into our work with After-School All-Stars, where spring's momentum turned into a full summer expansion: more than 25 dance and DJ classes running each week across the city. Numbers like that only mean something because of what is underneath them: students who now have somewhere to go after the bell rings, where their culture and their creativity are the curriculum.
Some of the most tender work happened at Boys & Girls Club Watts-Willowbrook, where teaching artist Rebekah Denegal picked back up with the community throughout May before we launched a full summer intensive there. There is something sacred about returning to a place. The kids remember you. You remember them. This year, one of those long relationships came full circle: Ronnell Stanford, who first came up through our programs as a student, taught his first class as a Creative Netwerk instructor this July. I don't know a better measure of what we're building than watching someone we once mentored become someone else's mentor.
Our LA students also had moments to shine on real stages this year, dancing at BlakTinX, LA's showcase of Black and Latinx dance artists, in a piece I had the joy of choreographing for them through our partnership with ICEF Performing Arts, and later carrying that same work to Downtown Disney and Olympic and Paralympic Day celebrations. Every one of those stages was a chance for a young person to be seen, fully, doing something they built with their own hands and feet.
None of this happens without the people teaching it, so we invested heavily this year in our own: one-on-one curriculum support, a new DJ curriculum developed under Head DJ Instructor Jesus “MadChill” Robles, and professional development on teaching methodology led by Creative Director King Charles. Because the joy our students feel in a classroom starts with the care we put into training the person leading it.
Chicago: The Culture, Coming Full Circle
Chicago is where footwork was born, and every summer here feels like a return to that truth. This year, that truth reached beyond our own chapter. When Footwork Appreciation Month arrived this August, a citywide, officially recognized celebration of the culture that raised so many of us, we welcomed Creative Netwerk staff from across the country to be part of it. Alongside our partners at CFology, we spent the week hosting daily classes taught by some of the true OGs of the footwork scene, opening the floor to dancers of every level who wanted to train in the culture we call home. Watching colleagues from other chapters step onto the floor, learn the foundations, and feel what our Chicago team has known their whole lives was one of the most full-circle moments of the year. This is a culture that pulls everybody in, and this summer, it pulled in our whole organization.
That same spirit carried us through the Bud Billiken Parade, one of the oldest and largest African American parades in the country, where our team marched with the same pride our students bring to every class. This June, we welcomed the Genesis Inspiration Foundation to Tuley Park to celebrate a new investment in our Chicago youth arts programming, though “celebrate” undersells it. Our students took the stage, told the story of the work in their own words, and then watched the Genesis team step onto the floor themselves to learn footwork, led by the very youth they came to support. That is the whole model, in one afternoon: young people as teachers, funders as students, joy as the great equalizer.
The rest of the season stayed just as full: sessions across the Chicago Park District at Tuley, Ridge, Calumet, and Kennicott Parks, a new branch of our youth dance group, a performance on the Navy Pier stage, and ten weeks of the Community Werkz Institute pouring into the next generation of our teaching artists. We could not be prouder of our own Michael Davis, “Mike D,” selected for the 2026 Dance Project Grant from the Chicago Dancemakers Forum, one of only ten dancemakers citywide honored this year. When Chicago Footwork gets recognized at that level, the whole culture wins, and so does every young person we've ever taught that this art form is worth taking seriously.
New York: Finding Their Voice on Stage
Our New York chapter spent the 2025–26 school year in deep partnership with Uncommon Collegiate Charter, leading a residency with teaching artists Melanie Aguirre and Roukijah Rooks (NutellaK) that did something I think about often: it didn't just teach students choreography, it taught them where it came from. Salsa, New Jack Swing, house, Litefeet, dancehall, Afrobeats: every style arrived with its history attached, so that by the time students began building their own piece, they weren't just moving, they were carrying something forward.
That work culminated on stage at UCC's Mid-Winter Showcase, where students performed with a confidence that had clearly been built session by session, not handed to them. But the part of this story that stays with me is what happened next. Some students who felt too much stage fright to perform live weren't left behind; they were given another way in. Melanie and NutellaK brought in a professional videographer, and students spent the rest of the year building a video project from the ground up: choosing their own costumes, shaping their own choreography, blending original movement with the dance trends already alive in their culture. Watching a young person find their way to an audience, even when the traditional path didn't fit them, is its own kind of joy, quieter, maybe, but just as real.
Santa Barbara: Our Widest Reach
If you want to see what it looks like when Creative Netwerk becomes part of the fabric of a place, look at Santa Barbara. This chapter now has one of the broadest footprints in our entire organization; on some days, our teaching artists are running more than ten classes across the county, at sites from Lompoc High School to Dos Pueblos High School and beyond, reaching students across Ventura, Oxnard, and Santa Barbara County. This summer, that footprint grew even further: we added Boys & Girls Club sites to our regular programming and brought our Fun in the Sun classes to Solvang Elementary, El Camino Elementary, Mary Buren Elementary in Guadalupe, Aliso Elementary in Carpinteria, and Harding University Partnership School.
This growth was recognized directly this year, too. Santa Barbara was awarded a grant from the Towbes Fund for the Performing Arts to support continued expansion of our school, after-school, and camp programming countywide, the kind of investment that is never just about the number attached to it, but a vote of confidence in the young people we serve. That confidence showed up in the numbers coming out of our long-standing partnership with Lompoc High School, where nearly 300 students gave us feedback this spring, the large majority of them reporting they felt more interested in the arts because of it. One student put it simply: “All cultures are important because we are all together. Through Hip-Hop, salsa, and other styles with Creative Netwerk, we learn more about each other and where people come from.”
Then there is Jhai Crutchfield, who came up through our Los Angeles programs with ICEF and loved the work so much that when he headed north to attend UCSB, he brought Creative Netwerk with him, now assistant teaching dance alongside our Santa Barbara staff. Our LA team spent part of the summer traveling north too, covering programming across Ventura County, Solvang, and Santa Barbara County so that no student missed a class while SB staff were away. Santa Barbara students also got something simple and rare this year: their very first concerts, through subsidized tickets to the Santa Barbara Bowl, where they saw Train, Flight of the Conchords, and Jack Johnson live. Jhai's story, the cross-chapter support, and a kid's first concert are all the same truth seen from different angles: we are one organization, one family, and the joy travels with the people who believe in it.
One Organization, One Joy
Four cities. Four teams. Four completely different communities, school calendars, and cultures of dance. Yet reading through everything our chapters accomplished this spring and summer, I kept landing on the same feeling. Joy showed up as a major new investment in Chicago and as a kid's first concert in Santa Barbara. It showed up as a former student teaching his first class in LA and a shy student finding a way onto camera in New York. It showed up in a grant, in a parade, in a park, on a stage, in a classroom on a Tuesday afternoon that nobody outside of it will ever hear about.
That is what I mean when I say joy is not decorative. Joy is the whole point. It is what happens when young people are given real access to art, real investment in their growth, and real people who show up for them again and again. This summer, across every chapter of Creative Netwerk, that is exactly what we built, and we are just getting started.
Photos 1 and 2 by @ElvonImages
Photo 2 by Dorian Cohen