Chapman’s annual Airbands show returns in-person, raises over $80,000 for Girls on the Run, Camp Del Corazon

It’s 11 p.m. on a Wednesday and I’m in a room full of highly-enthused fraternity boys and fervently dancing sorority girls. Everyone is drenched in sweat. I can hardly hear myself think over the loud music. I watch everyone in the room dancing as hard as they can with bodies everywhere on the verge of colliding. I’m sitting cross-legged on a table that’s been smushed against a wall to make space for the dance floor. 

But, we’re not at a frat house. We’re in Beckman Hall room 214, and this is Airbands rehearsal.

Airbands is an annual philanthropy event put on by the Epsilon Nu chapter of Gamma Phi Beta at Chapman. Each sorority is paired with a fraternity or the occasional student organization — this year, Black Student Union partnered with Delta Tau Delta — and together they make up a dance to compete against the other chapters. This year, the participating fraternities and sororities generated a slew of movie-related dances in response to the “Blockbusters” theme.

 A look into the preparation, performance and record-breaking results of Gamma Phi Beta’s annual philanthropy event, “Airbands.” TIFFANY LE, Staff Photographer

Three to four nights each week for the last three weeks, members of each Greek chapter have crammed themselves into classrooms on campus from 10 p.m. to 12 a.m. in order to rehearse their dances. The entire process culminated into the Airbands show performances that occurred over the weekend.

Each chapter appointed one to two choreographers to lead their team to victory, who were charged with creating the concept, choosing the music, making up steps, creating formations and leading rehearsals. Sarah Childs, a junior dance major who took on this role for Alpha Gamma Delta and Pi Kappa Alpha’s team, had never even experienced Airbands in-person until this year. Childs, along with her co-choreographer Kathryn Nowell, led the team to a highly entertaining Halloween movie-themed performance. 

“Movement-wise, we wanted to make the guys feel comfortable, and we knew they didn’t have a lot of dance experience,” Childs said. “We tried to make things symmetrical, right on the beat and sort of groovy, so that it would make sense even to non-dancers.”

Meghan Caito, a senior dance major, was one of the choreographers for the Tri Delta and Alpha Epsilon Pi teams. Caito also helped choreograph for Airbands her sophomore year, and this year, she created a dance for their “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” theme.

“We actually had less practices this year than we did sophomore year, which made things a little more stressful,” Caito said. “We’ve been focusing on getting everyone to dance super full out, because once everyone knows the steps, we still need them to go bigger. (The performers) might be like, ‘I’m tired’... but I’m like, ‘I know, but we still have to go bigger.’”

Caito is not the only choreographer who believes in pushing her dancers to go harder. In Delta Gamma and Phi Tau’s final rehearsal before the tech performance, choreographers Amy Magsam and Tayler McGuire gave a quick pep talk before their last run of their Marvel-themed dance.

Magsam, a senior dance and strategic and corporate communications double major, said to “Go out and leave it all out here,” while senior dance and integrated educational studies double major McGuire said, “These are our last moments dancing together before we’re on stage, so let’s push and make the absolute most of it.”

Throughout the run, all the dancers screamed on the sides when they weren’t in a section — a preview of the supportive, rowdy crowd to come over the weekend. 

There were three Airbands shows: one Friday night, a matinee on Saturday and the final show on Saturday night, which had the highest stakes. The preparation is always rigorous and the audience is always loud, but this year brought an energy that few can remember ever experiencing before, which Cooper Scott — a junior strategic and corporate communication major and dancer on the Alpha Phi and Beta Theta Pi team — can attest to. 

“It’s been very different, even from Airbands my freshman year,” Scott said. “Thinking back, it was not nearly this intense or this competitive. I think since we’re finally back in person, everybody wants to come back with vengeance, and it’s just amplifying everything we do.”

TIFFANY LE, Staff Photographer

The theater buzzed with anticipation in the moments before the first show on Friday night, and when the three MCs from Gamma Phi Beta walked on stage, the audience erupted in cheers, which continued throughout every piece that night. Ironically, the crowd was probably at its quietest during intermission, because no one was screaming in support of their friends on stage. 

To describe the show as entertaining would be a gross understatement; it was riveting, hilarious and impressive. Audiences saw dances about Disney, Marvel, Men In Black, Family Movie night, Willy Wonka and more. The show also featured special performances by the Chapman University Dance Team and the hip-hop group Team Shaka, which added an element of professional-level skill to an already delightful show.

The most shocking part of the entire event, though, is how much money was raised. Alie Kryder, the philanthropy chair of Gamma Phi Beta, was in charge of the entire event. The senior dance and psychology double major originally set the event’s fundraising goal at $27,000, but after quickly blowing past that number, she adjusted that objective to $50,000. Instead, the final count of donations landed at a whopping $80,407 — an amount far greater than the proceeds of Airbands in any other year.

How did they do it? Kryder had a creative and extremely effective idea. 

“I was lucky enough to come into the position as philanthropy chair with an event that was already so incredible and had such a large participation rate,” Kryder said. “I knew we could do something more with it, so I created a fundraising competition. The winner of the entire event is going to be an average of what team raised the most money throughout the week, and what team gets the highest points for performance from our judges.”

Previously, the fundraising from Airbands came mostly from ticket sales, but Kryder’s idea channeled all of that competitive energy from the chapters into raising money for Gamma Phi Beta’s philanthropies: Girls on the Run and Camp Del Corazon. 

Ultimately, with the combination of their dance scores from the judging panel and the amount of money they raised, Delta Gamma and Phi Tau’s team won Airbands. The moment was particularly exciting for Delta Gamma, who won the contest in 2019 — the last time the event took place in person. Co-choreographer Tayler McGuire felt confident going into the evening, but was still overwhelmed with emotion when her team was announced as the winner.

“That initial feeling when they called our names was so happy, and then a wave of happy tears just fell onto me,” McGuire said. “We all worked so hard — all the girls, all the boys, me and my co-choreographers. And finally, all those times we stayed until midnight (or later) were worth it.”

Delta Gamma and Phi Tau weren’t alone in putting in hours of work to the Airbands event, and in a sense, every team won because of the entertaining performance and record-breaking fundraising they contributed to. 

“At the end of the day, this has been (an effort from) the entire Chapman community,” Kryder said. “This happened because of us collectively; it's our love and drive for helping others (and) our competitive drive to freaking win. After COVID-19, no one knew if we would ever get a chance to come together like this as a community again. This is not just your typical Airbands, this isn't just coming together to raise money, this is bringing the community back together. It's a great representation of what we can expect to see from Chapman students, as a family and as a community, in the future.”