On Sundays from 6 to 8 p.m., feet slide and stomp across the floors of Ramsey Student Center’s squash courts. Amongst the white paint smell of the studio, the bright lights reflect off of polished floors and early 2000s R&B echoes across the room from a Bluetooth speaker. Figures can be seen stretching, socializing, but most notably, dancing.
This is UGA’s newly founded fusion dance company, BadDogz, which centers itself on combining elements of majorette and urban dance styles while also providing an outlet for its participants to express themselves, both individually and to their community.
“My senior year of high school, I did majorette with the band as an auxiliary, and it was HBCU style, majorette like based off of the Alabama State Stingettes or the dancing dolls of Southern University,” Elisa Bibb, founder and president of BadDogz, said.
Bibb and other girls she knew on campus felt an absence of spaces for HBCU-style majorette dancing, which led her to look for ways to introduce it into UGA’s dance culture.
“In the fall of 2024 I decided to ask a couple of my friends to be a part of a majorette team with me, and I charted it on Oct. 2, 2024,” Bibb said.
According to Chase Blackwell, the secretary of BadDogz, so far the young dance company has performed at the African Student Union’s Date Auction and UGA’s Black History Month show, as well as Pamoja Dance company’s fall showcase.
Alongside its focus on majorette and urban styles, Bad Dogz also leaves room to not only deviate from traditional baton-twirling seen in majorette dancing, but also for other dancers from different dance backgrounds to contribute to the team’s choreography throughout rehearsal.
“One of the foundations or principles of BadDogz is building a community,” Bibb said. “So I told them at the interest meeting for BadDogz [that] we will make choreo at practice.”
Although choreography is often provided prior to rehearsals, the workshopping period is spent adapting it into something new or innovating new choreography altogether as a group.
“Being in this piece [Pajoma performance] has been a big learning moment because, this team is not just one person…Like today Elise is in charge, but the next day someone else could be in charge,” said Zoe Yarbor, a freshman biomedical physiology major minoring in dance.
The organization also takes advantage of social media being a collaborative platform for dance through their weekly ritual, TikTok Thursdays.
“Elisa originally came up with it,” Mi’Khayla Kempson, a junior sociology major, said. She is the organization’s social media manager.
“That’s one way that each dancer can express themselves. Find something nice that they like to do, and just put it out there and show people their talent,” Kempson said.
BadDogz will perform in UGA’s New Dance Theatre for the Pamoja Dance Company Showcase on Friday, April 11.
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