BY ERICA HOWES
With laughter and excited chatter buzzing through the audience, the mood was set for a film featuring classic teenage romance and rebellion. On January 16th, the audience at the Mayfair Theatre fell for Patrick Swayze’s irresistible charm and passionately sang along to the songs of Dirty Dancing (1987) in a free screening run by the Carleton University Alumni Association.
“I think it’s such a classic because it’s all about finding your passion and finding out who you are and where you want to be in life,” Katie Stanley, a first year Humanities student at Carleton, said after viewing the film. “It’s about music bringing people together through an art form that isn’t a career, that isn’t for money.”
Matthew Prowse, the coordinator of the Carleton Alumni Student Awareness Program and the organizer of the event, chose Dirty Dancing because it’s considered a hit for all ages.
“I believe Dirty Dancing will allow us to achieve that balance as a populist classic that transcends a generation and also remains a pleasure to watch over and over again,” he said.
The Carleton University Alumni Association and the Alumni Student Awareness Program are the organizations that sponsored this free public event. Prowse explained how the event wasn’t only planned for an audience of Carleton students, but the whole Carleton community as well. “This is part of a broader strategy to actively engage students and recent alumni, both on and off-campus,” Prowse said. “Our intent is to deliver unique social programming that is catered towards groups that may have been previously unengaged.”
The Mayfair Theatre was roughly three quarters full with an audience of all ages including over-enthusiastic Dirty Dancing fans like Katie Shannon, a first-year Carleton business student. “I literally watch it all the time with my parents,” Shannon confessed. “All the songs I know and will be singing!”
The audience also included attendees who remembered when Dirty Dancing was first released in theatres in 1987. “I think it’s one of those movies when you come of age,” said Louise Hayes, an Executive at the Carleton Alumni Association. “So you remember when you were 14 or 15.”
The atmosphere was light and fun – with the whispers of chatter throughout the film and voices singing along with the characters on screen, it was evident most of the audience had seen the movie Dirty Dancing at least once before.
“The atmosphere was great,” Stanley said. “This is a smaller movie theatre and everyone’s in nice and close. And it’s more of a community feel.”
The Carleton Alumni Student Awareness Program hopes to host many other events for the Carleton community in the upcoming months. Carleton students Shannon and Stanley eagerly expressed that they would attend more of these events in the future.
“It was a good time,” Stanley said. “It was one of those memorable times.
Pic sources: http://spectrumculture.com/201…