Let’s Dance!
Photo courtesy Synthia Sumukti
It’s a rare occasion when a team goes for a three-peat — a term first popularized by the head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, Pat Riley, in the late 1980s.
But the Ballroom Dance Club at University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa has the opportunity to do just that — continue its recent supremacy on the dance floor by waltzing and cha-cha-ing its way to a hopeful third-straight national title later this month.
Ravi Narayan and Synthia Sumukti are the coaches and founders of the dance club, which is a registered independent organization at UH Mānoa. They’re also a married couple who are eagerly looking forward to this year’s USA National Collegiate DanceSport Championships, scheduled for March 27-29 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
“It’s a different role we’re in because now we’re the hunted,” says Narayan of once again being a favorite at the annual competition. “But we’re also very proud of what the dancers have done.”
“I still believe that competing at nationals is a learning experience,” Sumukti adds. “We encourage our students to focus more on enjoying the process and less on the results, and to treat the national championships as a milestone in their life — not the end goal.
“Of course, it would be absolutely wonderful if we do win for the third year in a row.”
The team burst onto the competitive dance scene at the 2024 collegiate championships, winning top honors for the highest point average. Last year, the squad claimed the same prize for highest average placement.
Now comes the chance to three-peat at an event that includes other top programs from The Ohio State University, Purdue University, University of Minnesota and University of Houston. Representing the UH Mānoa team will be 26 dancers competing in four major styles of ballroom dance: International Standard, International Latin, American Smooth and American Rhythm.
To better prepare themselves, team members have been putting in long hours of practice on Sundays and Tuesdays. Some have even taken up their coaches’ offer for additional training on Thursdays. The dancers’ dedication demonstrates how serious they are about nationals, their coaches say.
“When we coached our team to the first national championship in 2024, we had no idea what to expect from the team or what their experience would be,” Sumukti explains. “As coaches, we shared our knowledge from being competitive dancers and provided them with as much information as we could. The goal was that they would have an enjoyable experience both competing and traveling to the mainland.
“But now that the University of Hawai‘i team has taken first place at both the 2024 and 2025 championships, we know we are no longer the underdogs and have gotten the attention of the other top teams in the United States.
“As one coach of a top team admitted to us privately, ‘Your team is an inspiration to us and has lit a fire under our team,’” she adds.
When the Ballroom Dance Club at UH Mānoa officially formed in August 2022, its founders were adamant about reviving interest in a dance form that had experienced a precipitous drop in participation.
“Ballroom dance is really sort of a dying art form,” Narayan notes. “In the United States, most of the dancers are over 50 years of age. In fact, many are over 70. So all over the U.S., we’re seeing a decline in interest.
“We used to have several thousand dancers in Hawai‘i. Now at a typical event at the Ala Wai Palladium (a premier ballroom dance venue located at 404 Kapahulu Ave.), you’re lucky to have 100 participants. In the past, you’d have several hundred people.”
To make ballroom dance more attractive to the younger generation, Narayan and Sumukti chose to focus on key features they believed the dance form could offer today’s youth.
“Ballroom dancing has a lot of things that college students don’t have,” Narayan explains. “For example, it requires you to talk to somebody — to actually get up, stand in front of someone else and communicate. We figured this would be great for this generation, who does much of their communication on their phones, to experience.”
As with past squads, the 2026 roster is dominated by students in STEM majors such as architecture, earth science, computer science, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering. Sumukti confesses to being impressed with the speed at which her students process and perform dance moves. But she also finds their passion for the physical activity to be both refreshing and inspiring.
“I like being surrounded by the energy and enthusiasm of the college students, and I love teaching them since they learn really fast,” she says. “Their minds are clear and their bodies are able to apply what we teach them and perform it quickly. Their energy invigorates me and keeps me youthful.”
Because more and more young adults have been getting involved with the dance form, Sumukti sees better days ahead.
“Teaching them has allowed me to understand how this generation differs from my generation,” she adds. “The way they see the world is completely different than how we see it and this gives me a lot of hope for their future.”
Before discovering ballroom dancing, Narayan and Sumukti had put their own interests on hold while raising their first child, a daughter named Dayinta. However, by the time daughter No. 2, Prita, arrived 13 years later, the couple was determined not to repeat the same pattern of overnurturing, intensive parenting.
“For us, it was like starting all over again,” Narayan explains. “We were not going to continue having a life like we already did, taking our child to soccer and ballet, for example, and then waiting there for two hours.
“So my wife said, ‘We are going to do something for ourselves.’”
As fate would have it, Sumukti happened to be driving past Noelani Elementary School in Mānoa one day when she saw that “something”: a sign announcing an upcoming ballroom dance class. Almost immediately, her interest was piqued.
“I wanted to learn something together with my husband and liked the idea of ballroom dance as a partnership,” says Sumukti, who has a master’s degree in dance from the Indonesian Institute of Fine Arts, with a specialty in classical Javanese dance.
Of course, there was just one problem: Narayan wasn’t interested.
“She kept sort of bringing it up with me, and I sort of quietly avoided it because, like most men, my concept of ballroom dancing was what I saw in movies and it just didn’t seem exciting to me,” he says.
Eventually, Sumukti decided the class was much too important to ignore and chose to register the couple anyway.
“I was like, OK, I got dragged into it,” recalls Narayan, laughing. “So, at that point, we started taking our 2-year-old to the class. We’d tell her, ‘This is Mommy and Daddy’s time, so just like we do stuff for you at ballet, now it’s your turn to sit and watch us.’
“And that’s basically how our journey into ballroom dancing started.”
A few years into their initial lessons, the couple began competing locally. Subsequently, they cofounded the Honolulu chapter of the USA Dance K-12 program. But then the pandemic happened and the couple decided it needed a new group of students.
“After COVID hit and things started opening back up again, we realized the K-12 program wasn’t really going anywhere. So we thought, ‘Why don’t we try a college program?’” Narayan explains. “Our thinking was that we might be more successful starting a club with college students because I’m an adjunct faculty member at the University of Hawai‘i, where I teach computer science part time.”
Still, Narayan knew he would have a challenge on his hands because while the students were all sharp-minded individuals, they were also non-dancers. So he came up with a clever plan.
“I said, ‘Hey, you guys take this dance class and I’ll give you extra credit,’” recalls Narayan. “They all looked surprised because who offers dance extra credit in computer science? But surprisingly, they were like, ‘Who’s teaching the class?’ And I said, ‘Well, me and my wife.’ And that got them interested, because half of them were like, ‘This is going to be hilarious watching this guy dance!’”
Ultimately, around 20 students and a few teacher assistants chose to take part in the initial class. Several students even chose to bring along a few of their friends.
The results were positively unexpected.
“I really don’t know what their motivation was — it was probably curiosity. But they showed up and we’ve been dancing ever since,” Narayan says.
