It’s not every Saturday night that a school gym fills with neon lights and dubstep as 900 students dance their hearts out until 1:00 a.m. This rare sighting could only mean one thing: bRAVE was back for the third year Feb. 22.

The dance this year was similar to last year’s successful event, with students entering at 6:00 p.m. and dancing for seven hours. Students had a great time and raised over $27,000 for the Leukemia & Lymphoma society—over $7,000 above last year’s total.

“It was really crowded, but it was fun,” said freshman and first time bRAVE attendee Annie Burton. “At the beginning, when we had more energy, it was fun in the dancing room.”

The atmosphere was exciting and carefree. People spent the majority of the night on the dance floor, with some stopping every couple of hours to take a short break in the small gym and take weight off their dancing feet.

After four hours of jamming on the dance floor, Poms performed a great routine for the students, who watched intently as they danced in complete synchronization.

This year, a new system for food was also put into place. Instead of giant crowds fighting to grab food off a small table like last year, students were assigned wristbands by grade, to determine the time slot during which they were permitted to get food. Options included pizza, empanadas and burritos, all of which were gobbled up by hungry students. Bagels were brought out later in the night for students to snack on as well.

“The wristband system worked out 10 times better than we had imagined,” said senior Jenna Kantor. Kantor was the co-head of the bRAVE committee with senior Elizabeth Meyer. “Handing out the food helped ensure that every kid was able to get an equal amount of food, and by the end of the night most kids were satisfied after we brought out the bagels.”

The last few hours were the most energetic, with performances by different musical groups. The Beastie Boys, consisting of Carson Lystad, Joey Williams and Franky Beiser rapping, Jason Frankel on bass, Ryan Savage on the guitar and Jordan Wolff on the drums, played exuberant renditions of two songs by the famous rap group of the same name. After the previous songs ended, the band came back for a rousing encore that was a mashup of several different artists, including Miley Cyrus and Kanye West.

Later, drumline performed for the attendees, causing the already-close crowd to gather even closer in preparation to scream the perennial “One, two, three, four let’s get busy!”

After another few hours of dancing, the night came to a close with everybody energetically counting down the last 10 seconds of the night.

The success of bRAVE was not lost on junior Olivia Weals, who came for her second year in a row.

“I love being able to say that I’m part of LLS month. Being able to come home from bRAVE and be like ‘we raised $27,000 to help find a cure for cancer,’ that’s amazing to me,” she said. “I think it’s so cool that we can just go and dance and have fun, but that we can still say we’re doing something good.”