Groups of students crowd around the Fine Yards Courtyard during the Foam Dance Party. The event, which had been at Cameron for nearly a decade, was discontinued for the Fall 2014 semester.
Jacob Jardel
Assistant Managing Editor
@JJardel_Writing
The Foam Dance Party, a Cameron fixture for almost a decade, has been discontinued. Since its establishment in 2005, the Foam Dance had been a staple of the fall semester, with students and guests dancing to popular music in a foam-filled Fine Arts Courtyard.
The decision to discontinue the Foam Dance was not a rash one, however. Zeak Naifeh, Director of Campus Life, said that the group who made the decision had been monitoring the dance and seeing how they could tweak it over the years.
“Our big things are a positive and safe environment,” he said, “and those two things were not aligning with the event.”
After this last year, the group felt that neither of those criteria was met, especially when they took into account the size of the venue and the increasing number of people attending the event.
“The venue is a small venue,” Naifeh said. “With such great numbers of people, it’s hard for us to provide it as a safe environment. We just hit the point where that was no longer. It’s something we thought long and hard about to make the best decision for the students.”
Megan Canfield, Student Activities Specialist and Faculty Advisor for PAC, corroborated this point.
“I think the students will be kind of upset,” she said. “But we think it’s in the best interest. We’ve outgrown the space. We want to make sure that safety is the top priority.”
However, the students Canfield has encountered up to this point have understood the rationale behind the decision.
“There’s been kind of that ‘Oh, darn’ moment at the beginning,” she said, “but they’re really understanding when we explain our viewpoint of it. I think they’re excited to see what else we’ll bring in the future.”
Canfield assured that there would still be outlets for those who used the Foam Dance as a venue to showcase their rhythmic abilities.
“We still offer dances to students,” she said. “In December, we’ll have the Winter Dance Social, and again at Homecoming we’ll have a dance.”
As far as large-scale replacements go, Canfield mentioned that the process to find a suitable substitute was still ongoing.
“We’re working on something to replace it that’s a little bigger. As of right now, there are no solid details on what that will be, but we do know there will be something this year and in the future to act as a substitution.”
Canfield also mentioned the number of smaller-scale annual activities occurring throughout the year as potential replacements. But with the magnitude of the Foam Dance, finding a substitute will be an ongoing and adaptive process.
“This was definitely on the larger scale,” she said of the Foam Dance. “It’ll just have to see how funding goes, how the students respond to the events and things like that.”
According to Naifeh, though, the discontinuation of the dance for this year does not mean permanent cancellation.
“I think there’s always a possibility,” he said. “We would really have to sit down and look at the way it has been and then what that will look like in the future.”
However, he also noted that a return would not happen in the near future.
“Is there a chance? Yes, there’s always a chance,” Naifeh said. “In the near future, probably not. We do have a lot of things that would have to come into play to make that happen.”