Dancing into Summer Solstice

Why La Boheme Dance Group Inspires People to Join, Return, and Begin Again

Summer Solstice has always felt like the true beginning of the season in Santa Barbara. It is the moment the city tips fully into joy, and nowhere is that more visible than in the annual Solstice Parade.

This year, the 52nd annual Summer Solstice Parade moved up Santa Barbara Street beneath the theme Wave, with dancers, skaters, musicians, and makers interpreting it in ways that felt oceanic, playful, surreal, and exuberant. The parade began at Ortega Street and continued to Alameda Park, where the celebration carried on into the evening. But as anyone who has ever danced in Solstice knows, the real story begins long before the parade route.

Two years ago, I wrote about my own Solstice journey in two parts. The first came while I was still learning to dance with La Boheme Dance Group, immersed in rehearsals, costume making, and the vulnerability of stepping far outside my comfort zone. The second came after the parade, when the nerves had given way to exhilaration, gratitude, and the jubilant feeling of having done something I was not at all sure I could do.

That experience taught me how much courage, discipline, and joy live behind the spectacle. This year, I wanted to ask a different question: what keeps calling people back, and what inspires someone to say yes for the first time?

For Veronica Slavin, dancing in the Solstice Parade began in a deeply personal place. After being hit by a drunk driver, she found herself searching for something that could help her heal, both physically and mentally. She first reached out to La Boheme thinking she might simply attend a few dance classes. Instead, she was welcomed into Solstice rehearsals in 2018 and says she has never looked back. “It’s joy, art, movement, community, as well as a much-needed escape,” she told me. “It’s the start of summer, new beginnings, grateful that I can still dance, no matter what it might look like to others.”

Her words capture something essential about La Boheme. People may arrive because they are curious, or because they want a creative outlet, or because they feel an intuitive pull toward the parade’s exuberance. But what they often find is something deeper than performance. They find ritual, belonging, and connection. Slavin also spoke about the acceptance she found within the group. “I didn’t expect to find the community that is La Boheme,” she said. “No one is judging. You just go for it and have fun.”

Juli Askew’s journey carried a different kind of transformation. After years of struggling with obesity, she promised herself that if she could reclaim her health, she would celebrate by dancing with La Boheme in the Solstice Parade. “I am still a work in progress,” she told me. “But the joy and freedom I felt being able to dance was worth gold.” What moved me most in her words was not only the sense of personal triumph, but the way she described being held by the group around her. She said she felt loved, supported, and inspired by the women of La Boheme, a reminder that Solstice can be as much about collective encouragement as individual courage.

For first time dancer Carla Keisler, joining La Boheme was also a declaration. “As I approach my 60th birthday, it’s time to shed stereotypes of what old is and how one is supposed to behave after a certain age,” she told me. “Embrace power, strength, and grace always. La Boheme represents all that and more to me.” That spirit of reinvention feels especially resonant in a parade that has always made room for self-expression, imagination, and bold personal joy.

For Teresa Kuskey Oshay, founder of La Boheme Productions, the parade is about far more than choreography. “Creating a moving show traveling up through Santa Barbara creates a lot of love, joy, and community,” she told me. She described La Boheme as “a slice of our Santa Barbara and our surrounding communities,” adding that the troupe works not only to create something joyful for the crowd, but to build confidence and empowerment within the dancers themselves. After two months of rehearsals, she said, dancers leave with “new bodies, confidence, sharper brains, and resilience.” For some, that transformation is unexpectedly emotional. “Those that thought they could not, have cried and thanked me,” she said.

And the emotion does not end when the parade does. After making our way up State Street, we gathered in Alice Keck Park Memorial Garden, where the adrenaline began to settle into something softer. Alongside the relief of having made it through and the midday exhaustion under the Santa Barbara solstice sun, there were tears, hugs, and a kind of collective amazement. This year, La Boheme had 110 dancers, 60 of them new, each arriving with her own reason for saying yes. Some arrived carrying personal heartache. Some came to prove to themselves, as I did, that they still could. Others may not have had the words for why they joined when rehearsals began, only to find that by the end, the answer was written clearly in joy, relief, and pride. 

That, perhaps, is what makes Solstice so enduring in Santa Barbara. We are often celebrated for our wine country, our beaches, and our mountain views, and rightly so. But a place is never defined by scenery alone. It is defined by the traditions that bring people together and by the culture they create together. Solstice is one of the most vivid expressions of that truth. It is whimsical, theatrical, and distinctly Santa Barbara, but it is also deeply rooted in participation.

As someone whose work so often centers on place, culture, and experience, I have spent years writing about what makes a destination memorable. Solstice Santa Barbara and dancing with La Boheme has reminded me, again and again, that some of the most lasting memories are not made by watching alone, but by stepping in. By rehearsing. By laughing through it. By trusting the process and joining the parade. There is luxury in our beauty, certainly, and Santa Barbara has that in abundance. But there is another kind of richness here too, one made of shared tradition, creative expression, and community rituals that welcome people back into themselves and into one another. Summer Solstice is one of those rituals.

And that is why, every year, when June arrives and the city gathers to welcome summer, Solstice still feels like a beginning. Not only of the season, but of that annual reminder that joy, when it is shared, becomes part of the character of a place.