Meet Alethia Espinal and Sydney O’Brien of First Friday Fusion

Today we’d like to introduce you to Alethia Espinal and Sydney O’Brien.

Alethia and Sydney, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
San Diego has a vibrant partner dance community in general, but recently Fusion Dancing has fallen out of the partner dancing scene in San Diego. I recently had to stop dancing for eight months due to illness. When I came back to partner dancing, I asked my old friend Philip Einstein, who eventually became our DJ coordinator, where to go Fusion Dancing in San Diego. I was shocked when he told me that Fusion had died out.

Intent on resurrecting the community, we immediately drafted plans for First Friday Fusion over pizza in North Park. After gathering a close group of friends, we got to work finding a way to make their ideas a reality. I found our beautiful venue, Crown Dance, while Sydney, our Social Media Coordinator, started our Facebook page and kept track of behind the scenes details, all the while the group chose creative directions for the event.

With this collaborative effort, First Friday Fusion was born with our first event in November. Since then, we’ve been working diligently to establish our event as a San Diego go-to for Fusion Dancers and bring our community more great dancing. -Alethia

Has it been a smooth road?
At first, it was difficult to coordinate team efforts and contribution because of uneven schedules and outside responsibilities. Everyone here leads outside lives, many of us have jobs and some of us are full-time students, so First Friday Fusion has really been an outside project.

None of us got into this to make money or are here to have a career, First Friday Fusion has really always been an effort to bring more dancing to our community first and foremost. Thankfully, as we’ve settled into our group roles, we have been able to communicate and work together with our varied schedules to make this run as smoothly as possible. -Alethia

It was also at times somewhat daunting because none of us have really started a dance event before. There was a lot of time I spent in front of my computer, just researching things like what goes into an effective code of conduct, and how other dance events word their facebook updates. We built this from the ground up, but I feel it’s really forced us to put our best work in to ensure this event is as successful as it can be. -Sydney

We’d love to hear more about your business.
From the beginning, I founded First Friday Fusion to be a dancing space that caters to our dancer’s needs and provides freedom for expression.

Fusion is a dance founded on the mixing of dancing styles where you can take in our take out certain styles or stylistic elements to make a dance that is unique fusion. Fusion is singular among the dancing community because it doesn’t rely on just one dance style or footwork technique, and partners can instead bring a different dancing background to one dance and meld them seamlessly. -Alethia

At First Friday Fusion we seek to embody the creativity of Fusion as a dance, and we welcome dancers of all backgrounds to dance and have a good time. We also have designed our event around the wants of the dancers first and foremost.

When she started this, Alethia gathered a group of dancers for our management team with diverse dancing backgrounds, from as little as half a year of experience (like me) to over twenty years of experience, to help create this event with the dancers in mind. Between us all in the management team, we have dancers with teaching experience, several DJs, and background in various dancing styles.

As a group, our happiest moments are when we hear from dancers how we’re positively affecting the dancing community, and how much fun they’ve had at our events. -Sydney

Is our city a good place to do what you do?
Recently San Diego has experienced a downturn in partner dancing, several great organizers and events have left the dancing scene, leaving a bit of a vacuum in their place. First Friday Fusion is our response to this, and an effort to build the San Diego dancing community and reach more people.

Around the country, other cities tend to have already established Fusion scenes, so we are in some ways building from the group up, as we are currently San Diego’s only fusion event. As a new business, there have been some anxieties about the level of interest, but the community has really given their support and shown appreciation for our efforts. -Sydney

This San Diego dancing community has been our inspiration from the beginning. We all consider San Diego our dancing home, and the dancing community here has been full of warm and friendly people who have been so welcoming and accepting of all of us. I may be biased, but we really feel you’d be hard-pressed to find such an inviting scene any other place. -Alethia

Pricing:

• $8 admission

Contact Info:

• Address: 6904 Miramar Rd. San Diego, California
• Website: http://www.firstfridayfusion.com/
• Phone: 619-485-1988
• Email: firstfridayfusion@gmail.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FirstFridayFusion/

Image Credit:
Philip Einstein Photography, Charlie V Photography

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