About Us

For the past ten years, the Paradise Dancers have been dedicated to teaching teens how to ballroom dance at no charge. The Paradise Dancers have created a home-away-from-home, Add to this a different appreciation for popular music.  An ability to move to music and occasionally to perform in front of an audience, rank high on the teen’s fun list.  This also does wonders for self-esteem which sometimes is lacking in teens and a safe, comfortable environment for over 1000 youth. We have never charged the teens any fee or tuition for all of this and will continue that tradition.  We have classes for pre-teens, teens, and even adults, although adults are not free.  Our organization is a non-profit business and like any business, we encounter financial difficulty with only our adult class program and few annual events, to support the maintenance of the building and pay the monthly bills.

Every March, the Paradise Dancers presents a vaudeville type showcase of the teen’s hard work throughout the year called Rhythm ‘n Motion. This March saw the 8th year of our show with over 1000 people attending to watch the teens perform. We usually have 80 to 100 teens participating, The teens are encouraged to design and build sets, choreographing and dancing, designing posters, flyers and distributing them, and editing music. It’s a good organizational experience.     
This event is our largest source of annual income. We also put on a show in August based on the hit television show Dancing with the Stars. This event also provides monetary stability for some months.

Many of these teens go on to other dance venues and continue to enjoy dancing.  Others stay and move up to a higher level of dance here in Paradise. The original concept was to teach dancing to help teens eliminate shyness.  As the years unfolded we discovered many other benefits were happening.

A sense of community, or belonging is mentioned frequently among the teens.  Also some boys experience an empowerment in social skills.  They can be accepted by girls without exhibiting strange behavior.  The girls mention that they can relate to the boys in a safe, approved manner.  Politeness, respect and caring are stressed.

We perform at many functions in Butte County, including Gold Nugget Days,  Johnny Appleseed Days, some visiting acts at the Paradise Performing Arts Center, and at many Assisted Living facilities. The Paradise Dancers currently own and operate a dance studio in Paradise, CA.

After a number of years teaching in a large franchised studio system, I realized I wasn’t teaching very well. I was primarily just dancing with my students.
I subsequently started to watch the better dancers as they danced or taught. It was then I discovered the art of kinetics which I choose to suggest means movement with music.
After some months of study and observation I realized that my poor teaching performance was primarily due to teaching patterns instead of movements. I also realized that all patterns were combinations of a few simple basic movements. And so my teaching methods were born. I was able to tremendously simplify teaching dancing.

Dancing is:

1. Moving about the dance floor with rhythm.
2. Leading
3. Following

That’s all it is!!
So I began to teach movements, rhythm, leading and following with incredible results.
All our teachers now use this much simplified system, and it works.

Ten years ago I had a vision. In attempting to give back to a society which had given me so much, I chose to teach ballroom dancing to teenagers. Since I had taught dancing for twelve years with the Arthur Murray and Fred Astaire Studio systems, I felt I could offer the teens a professional dance education.