What Dancing Taught Me About This City
Vince Danh & partner Stephanie Kessler compete in 2024’s edition of Dancing with the Sioux Falls Stars, benefiting Empire Mental Health Support.
I'll be honest. When Addie Graham-Keller asked me to participate in Dancing with the Sioux Falls Stars in 2024, my first instinct was to say yes — before she finished the sentence.
My second instinct was panic.
But here's the thing: dance and I go way back.
Where It Started
My godmother taught me ballroom dancing as a teenager. Footwork, posture, how to lead, how to listen to a partner. It was one of those gifts you don't fully appreciate until years later.
In college, I found my way into breakdancing crews. Different discipline, same obsession — learning how your body moves, how to read a room, how to find the beat and commit to it. Dance was never just a hobby for me. It was a language.
Then life got busy. Business, community work, family. The dancing faded into the background the way things do when you stop making time for them.
So when Addie called, it felt like a door opening back up.
Learning to Follow Before You Can Lead
I was paired with Stephanie Kessler. We were the youngest pair in the competition. And from the first rehearsal, it was clear that whatever confidence I'd built up as a business owner and community organizer meant absolutely nothing on a dance floor.
On the dance floor, you can't fake it. You can't network your way through a routine. You either put in the work or you don't — and the audience knows the difference.
What I didn't expect was how much I loved it. Not just the performance, not just the crowd. The training. The discipline. The feeling of learning something hard and watching it slowly click. It reignited a spark I hadn't felt in years — and it didn't stop there.
Saying Yes to LiRa
That experience led me directly to audition for LiRa Dance Theatre Company for their 10th season. I got in. I danced in five pieces alongside performers of all ages, all backgrounds, all levels of experience. Some had trained their whole lives. Some, like me, were finding their way back.
What struck me most wasn't the performances themselves. It was the room. A professional dance company in Sioux Falls, South Dakota — filled with people who had chosen to stay here and build something here, because this city gave them a reason to.
That matters more than it sounds.
Art Drain Is Real — and We're Losing the Fight
For every artist who stayed, I know several who left. Not because they didn't love Sioux Falls — but because a city's creative life doesn't sustain itself. It needs consistent investment, distributed support, and enough opportunity to make staying feel like a real choice.
Right now, too many artists are making a different calculation. Minneapolis has more stages. Denver has more galleries. Kansas City has more grants and more pathways to a sustainable creative career. So they go.
And when they go, they take something with them that's hard to quantify but impossible to miss. The energy of a neighborhood. The reason young people want to move here. The cultural texture that makes Sioux Falls feel like a place, not just an address.
Sioux Falls has built real foundations for the arts. The next step is growing them — broadly, consistently, and in every corner of this city.
What Investment Actually Looks Like
I'm not talking about one big check to fix these issues. I'm talking about a city that treats the arts the way it treats infrastructure — as something essential, something that requires consistent funding, distributed support, and a long-term plan.
That means micro-grants for artists and small creative organizations. It means activating public spaces with performances, installations, and events — not just in the summer, not just downtown. It means making sure that when we build new neighborhoods and develop new corridors, arts and culture are part of the conversation from the beginning, not an afterthought.
It means a city council that doesn't ask "can we afford to invest in the arts?" but "can we afford not to?"
The Dance Floor Was a Reminder
I stood on that stage in 2024 as a business owner-turned dancer in the competition, nervous and grateful and right where I was supposed to be. And I looked out at a room full of Sioux Falls neighbors who had shown up — not because they had to, but because they wanted to be part of something alive.
That's what the arts do. They create the moments that make people feel like they belong to a city.
My godmother gave me that gift as a teenager. LiRa gave it back to me as an adult. Sioux Falls deserves a city government that makes sure the next generation doesn't have to leave to find it.
It's always been our city, and now is our moment.
Let's rise together. ☀️
— Vince Danh
Candidate, Sioux Falls City Council At-Large A | June 2nd, 2026