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A Collage Of Creative Voices: One Carbondale Middle Schooler Inspires Others To Keep Dancing Through The Pandemic

Sam Stableford is a hip-hop dancer from Carbondale. He spent the spring teaching a hip-hop class with Dance Initiative for elementary school kids at The Launchpad.
Kirsten Dobroth/Aspen Public Radio
Sam Stableford is a hip-hop dancer from Carbondale. He spent the spring teaching a hip-hop class with Dance Initiative for elementary school kids at The Launchpad.

Sam Stableford is a thirteen-year-old student at Carbondale Middle School. He’s also a hip-hop dancer; Stableford first started copying Michael Jackson’s dance moves he saw on TV as a two-year-old, and hasn’t stopped dancing since. This spring, he was asked to teach a hip-hop class for elementary school aged kids with Dance Initiative. The class met weekly at The Launchpad in Carbondale, and culminated in a performance at the park at 4th and Main in downtown late last month.

Stableford said he stopped dancing when things shut down due to the pandemic last year. That only lasted a short while, though, and teaching kids has given him a new outlet for his creativity and love for performing.

As part of our series “Young Artists: A Collage of Creative Voices” about how local kids have kept creating during the pandemic, arts and culture reporter Kirsten Dobroth sent this audio postcard from Stableford’s dance class at The Launchpad in Carbondale.

Kirsten was born and raised in Massachusetts, and has called Colorado home since 2008. She moved to Vail the day after graduating from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2011. Before relocating to Basalt in 2020, she also spent a year living in one of Aspen’s sister cities, Queenstown, New Zealand.
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