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At the Northwest Building on Oct. 19, the Harvard Ballroom Dance Team (HBDT) organized a professional showcase as part of their Harvard Beginners 2025 Competition. For the first time, this showcase featured four nationally — and in some cases, internationally — acclaimed professional ballroom dancing couples.
Couples Lyndsey Vasylenko and Nikita Vasylenko, Donovan Kirrane and Olga Goncharova, Parley Ford and Natalie Jolley, and Holly Hatleberg and Christopher Affonso swung, spun, and stunned the audience with beautiful moves in styles ranging from foxtrot to tango. It was an evening of jaw dropping lifts, awe-inspiring kicks, and an excitement in the air that lingered past the end of the showcase.
“It was absolutely incredible, I would say life-altering,” said Emily R. Allen, a Harvard Beginners competitor from UMass Amherst.
Perhaps the most amazing part was that it was free to watch — part of HBDT’s initiative to make ballroom dancing more accessible.
According to Kamil J. Kon ’27, the president of HBDT, “dancing is a very expensive sport.” Given this, Kon and HBDT are dedicated to making ballroom dancing accessible to all. For instance, Harvard Ballroom’s price for their introductory year, without financial assistance, comes out to about $1.50 per hour of lessons. According to Kon, the price of a comparable lesson in private studios can often be around $120.
Similarly, watching professionals can also be very expensive, especially national and international champions like the couples who performed at the showcase. However, the experience of watching experts perform can be incredibly inspiring — as it was for Kon, who began ballroom dancing in college out of curiosity. He recalled that during his first year dancing, he attended a similar showcase with advanced amateurs that motivated him to keep going.
“It was so amazing. I thought that I really want to do this one day,” he said.
Hence, Kon and HBDT are committed to providing a similar experience to everyone interested, no matter their financial background.
“We are really keen to try to get [ballroom dancing professionals] here and try to open this up to the Harvard community no matter how much it would cost us, just so we can hopefully give everyone a free chance to go through what I did at my first Harvard Beginners, and maybe get attracted to ballroom that way,” Kon said.
The professional showcase on Sunday did, in fact, inspire attendees.
“Seeing everyone, the grace [with] which they move around and the passion they have for dancing, it definitely inspired me to practice more and want to get back out,” Allen said.
Even outside of the ballroom, ballroom dancing can be beneficial in unexpected ways. Kon shared how ballroom dancing has impacted him both personally and professionally.
“It’s been a really enjoyable experience to compete, to practice, to train. Then there’s also the organizational aspect. I feel like I learned so much organizing an event like this and everything else,” he said.
Vasylenko, one of the professionals who performed, also shared how ballroom dancing has significantly impacted her life. Vasylenko is a professional Latin dancer who is an Amateur Rising Star Latin Champion of The Open Worlds Blackpool 2024.
“[Ballroom dancing] opened up so many doors for me. It’s how I met my husband, because we first started as dance partners and fell in love, and then it’s given us the opportunity to travel together, work together, and do our craft and our art ,and that’s been the best blessing and biggest thing I could ask for,” she said.
HBDT is providing the Harvard community accessible options to seek out these benefits. The goal is to allow anyone considering ballroom dancing to try it out.
“Never would I ever think when I started high school or ended high school that I would come to Harvard and my main interest would be ballroom dancing. I think we were all, to some degree, admitted to Harvard for our curiosity, whether it’s intellectual or whatever. Be curious to try out ballroom. It might be your thing,” Kon said.
