Around the Globe Celebrates First Year of Community Building

As the Around the Globe co-founders prepare for another year of showcasing multicultural dances in the Lexington community, they reflect on how much the organization has grown since its establishment in 2022.

Photo by Irina Koleva.

Seconds before the spotlights illuminated the dance floor at the 2023 Spring Festival, Around the Globe co-founder, Irina Koleva, gathered performers backstage to prepare for the biggest event in the organization’s history. Yelling over the roar of an audience of hundreds, the steady hum of speakers and the clinks and clacks reverberating off of beaded costumes, she took time to recognize how far Around the Globe had come in just one year.

“We took a deep breath together, and I remember thinking, ‘Everything is ready. Now, we just get to dance. We get to do what we love. We get to do what we do best,’” Koleva says.

She says the intimate moment — which captured the group’s growth from its inaugural dance showcase in 2022, with about 100 attendees, to the full-scale festival in April 2023, with 250 guests and more than 40 performers — stands out in her mind as the pinnacle of success for her multicultural dance organization.

Photo by Vivek Kumar.

Koleva, a 2022 Washington and Lee University alum, and fellow co-founder Aishwarya Vemagiri, a current junior at W&L, adopted a variety of strategies throughout last school year to fill a gap in the local community by building an inclusive dance floor.

“No organization on campus showcases culture in the way that we do, where it's a performance with costumes, choreography, songs and emcees. That's even something that's rare in Lexington as a whole,” Vemagiri says.

With more international students on campus than ever before — the 2023 winter semester welcomed 137 international students from over 50 different countries — Koleva says multicultural clubs like Around the Globe are increasingly important because they ensure that everyone can make W&L feel like home. A sense of community is crucial for international students to succeed, she says, especially as they adjust to both the rigors of a college education and the challenges of moving to a new country.

Photo by Henry Chen.

“Around the Globe plays a role in letting people share their way of life and their culture and feel connected to home in a place that can feel very disconnected,” Koleva says.

Building connections has been at the center of Around the Globe’s mission since its founding, Vemagiri says. After formally establishing the organization in the spring of 2022, the co-founders built a presence on campus by partnering with other student organizations and teaching them how to incorporate dance into their events.

With Vemagiri’s background in Indian classical dance and Koleva’s background in traditional folk dance from her home country of Bulgaria, the Around the Globe leaders knew that dance was the key other clubs needed to help international students practice and share their most beloved traditions. They collaborated with seven different student groups throughout the 2022-2023 school year, building choreography into events such as fashion shows and holiday celebrations.

Photos by Ewunik McCarthy, Henry Chen, and Jess Kishbaugh.

But Koleva and Vemagiri had a bigger vision — they wanted to help students connect not just to their roots, but also to each other.

“We really took this as an opportunity to help build up and strengthen the community of W&L as a whole,” Koleva says. “Because dance can be such a communal art form, it’s a great way to bring people together to exchange your cultural traditions and teach each other about your personal backgrounds.”

Around the Globe hosted four workshops, designed to help students learn the basics of a cultural dance from an expert, throughout the school year. The workshops, each with about 50 participants, ranged across styles from Salsa to Bollywood and taught students, even those with two left feet, how to honor and celebrate cultures from around the world through simple dance steps.

Photos by Vivek Kumar, Jess Kishbaugh, and Joe Lee.

The growth of the Around the Globe community culminated in the Spring Festival showcase in April, where guests were captivated by floral decorations, vibrant costumes, upbeat music and performances from every corner of the world, including semi-classical Indian dance, Irish step dance, Japanese Bon Odori and Polynesian Haka. Vemagiri says the highlight of the night for many attendees was the variety of traditional cultural foods that were served; the smells and flavors of favorite childhood meals are powerful ways to feel connected to home, she says.

Photos by Jess Kishbaugh, Irina Koleva & Vivek Kumar.

But she acknowledges that the true goals of Around the Globe go far past the delicious food or the spectacle of the spring showcase.

“It’s not just about dance,” she says. “The larger part of it is the connection and support system that’s there. Dance is just one of the facets and avenues we use to help create this connection.”

After a successful first year at Washington and Lee, Around the Globe will expand into the surrounding community in the 2023-2024 school year while still offering collaborations, workshops and showcases.

“We really want to be a bridge between the W&L community and Lexington and Rockbridge County as a whole, because it’s not just W&L that has a lack of cultural arts education that’s accessible,” Koleva says.

Photo by Vivek Kumar.

The anticipated growth will be aided by a new team of Around the Globe leaders. The organization, solely run by Koleva and Vemagiri just a year ago, now has 16 executive members that will facilitate outreach, event planning, communications and more.

Koleva says it's rewarding to see that “the energy we put out is now coming back to us” with increased involvement from students, professors and community members alike. But she says she’s not entirely surprised — she knows that dance has an immeasurable power to bring people together.

“Dance breathes life into you. It gives you excitement, joy, motivation and purpose,” she says. "It makes you appreciate the beautiful things that humans can create, especially when the future seems uncertain.”