Tara Brown, founder and director of Boston Dance Studios, never dreamed of opening a studio—in fact, she was originally against the career path. “I didn’t believe [owning a studio] could be lucrative and I knew it would be a lot of work,” she says. After a commercial dance career in New York City, Brown moved to Boston in 2020. As a dancer, she was confronted with a lack of professional training opportunities, particularly for “short, curvy Black women” like herself. She was pursuing avenues to teach heels classes in the city and was often turned away by studios who saw […]

Music, movement, space and lights flowed in an orchestrated manner, and the core ideas of the composition were explored with finesse in the choreography

The dance festival has been exclusively tailored for children, and will also feature a story-telling session

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Did your family Thanksgiving celebration include a trio of grandmas dancing to Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road”? A solo act of a vampire rocking out to Elton John’s “Can You Feel the Love Tonight”? If not, you may want to get your hands on a copy of Make It Dance, Cost n’ Mayor’s new card game.  As the title implies, players are given a zany scenario and encouraged to make it dance. A well-known dancing duo boasting over 10 million followers across social media, Cost n’ Mayor created this interactive game to encourage dancers and nondancers to move, laugh, […]

One defining quality dance training offers is honing a person’s ability to react to situations in real time. Whether salvaging an onstage mishap, hiding an error from the audience, or making quick decisions about survival when tragedy strikes, a dancer’s training informs them how to pivot quickly both onstage and in life. This was exactly the scenario for Daoyuan Chen, artistic director and founder of N&D Ballet, when he suffered a devastating ankle injury during The Nutcracker three months after joining Boston Ballet in 2012. “I didn’t expect my performance career to end at 22 years old,” says Chen. “I […]

When the casting sheet goes up, there’s one role that few students are excited to see their names next to: understudy. “We cast understudies all the time. And every time, there will be some kind of disappointment,” says Malu Rivera-Peoples, founder of Westlake School for the Performing Arts in California.  Getting asked to understudy not only makes students feel like a last-choice pick, but it can also be a uniquely challenging task to wrap their heads around. “Being an understudy is definitely more difficult than being a second or a third cast because, psychologically, you don’t have any idea if […]

To be a K–12 dance teacher is to be a master of time management, multitasking, and adaptability. Often teaching hundreds of students of all ages and skill levels every week for sometimes less than an hour at most, it’s a juggling act as you need to figure out what to fit into a 45-to-50-minute class. Should creative movement and improvisation be the priority? Or should students learn choreography? And what about technique?  Here are 9 tips for structuring a dance class for K–12 general-education students that strikes just the right balance. 1. Get to know your students. Unlike a studio, […]

Nilava drew parallels between dance and life while Prachi’s performance was inspired by Warli paintings at Kanakavalli’s ‘Rasa Margazhi Edit’ in Chennai