Mission Nonprofit Spotlight: Dancing Dragons

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Mission Nonprofit: Dancing Dragons

Each month, Thurston Community Media (TCMedia)’s Mission Nonprofit connects with local organizations and agencies that are making positive impacts in our communities. This month, Mission Nonprofit host Robert Kam sat down with Maddie Bee and Monica Moudy from Dancing Dragons, a line dancing nonprofit in Thurston County.

Maddie started Dancing Dragons as a dance team for competition. “I compete in line dance and when I was there, I was kind of selfish,” she says. ” I was there for line dance and there wasn’t a lot of people and I realized another way I could compete was with the team, which would bring friends, so I decided to start the Dancing Dragons team and when I went to my first event people just loved it.”

She knew Monica through the Country Dancers of Olympia, a prior nonprofit that had been around for over 30 years before they shut down. They were both teachers with that organization at the time. Maddie asked Monica if she wanted to join the Dancing Dragons competition team. She said yes.

Almost immediately, they were tripped up by COVID. “We taught online for a bit and we realized this was bigger than a team,” shares Maddie. “This is something people want and that’s when we decided to make it a nonprofit.”

Live classes have now resumed, and are held downstairs at Heritage Distilling. Classes are announced on the Facebook page currently, but they should have their website live soon, which will also give information on upcoming classes and events. The website will be thedancingdragons.com when it’s up.

Monica has been teaching dance since 2011 at Big Whiskey. She does partner as well as line dancing.

Line Dancing Competitions

There are five line dancing circuits, including four international. “Most people think of the bar…and you get to go and you get to dance and it’s a lot of country but line has grown enormous, which was a main thing for us, we wanted to keep the tradition of country and at the same time learn that you can do line dances to anything,” says Maddies. “There’s line dances to Disturb. There’s line dance to Jason Derulo.” Competitions, she adds, tend to stay more country.

Dancing Dragons competes in two of the circuits, United Country Western Dance Council (UCWDC), which is local and international, and World Dance Masters (WDM), which has one competition in Florida and one in Blackpool, England.

Everyone is encouraged to come to classes whether they want to compete or not. They also have a performance team for those that don’t want to compete, but would like to perform at events, like the Sweetheart Jamboree in Seattle every February and the Emerald City Hoedown.

For more information, watch the full video above and visit the Dancing Dragons Facebook page.

You can watch Mission Nonprofit on channel 77 on Sundays at 4:30 p.m., Tuesdays at 7 p.m., Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., and Saturdays at 6:30 p.m. You can also watch on TCMedia.org, Video On-Demand or our Roku channel. To learn more about what TCMedia does, visit the Thuston Community Media YouTube channel or the TC Media website and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

 

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