Courtesy of Stephanie Barnes
New Albany is home to many prominent figures and organizations in the world of dance, including an executive director of a world-famous professional dance company and a school that teaches dancers as young as 2 years old.
However, it hasn’t always been this way.
Broadway Bound Dance Centre became the first official dance studio in New Albany when it opened in 1994. Nikki McKenzie says she and her sister, Chrissy Danflous, who co-own the center together, rented a space for $300 when Broadway Bound first began.
“In our first year, we had about 50 dancers, which we thought that was great,” McKenzie says. “Now we have 800 dancers, but at the time, we thought 50 was a wonderful start.”
Before studios like Broadway Bound, residents of New Albany had to find options outside of the community if they or their children wished to participate in dance. McKenzie and her sister grew up dancing in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s and had to find a studio in Gahanna.
Prospective dance students sometimes had to drive more than 10 miles to the nearest studio just decades ago, but McKenzie says residents of New Albany now have whole dance communities in their own backyards.
“Our dancers will often refer to us as a family,” she says. “In addition to self-confidence and exercise and all of these kind of personal things that it provides a child, that’s my favorite thing about our studio is our sense of family.”
Aspiring dancers can find yet another welcoming dance community in the New Albany Ballet Company, which was founded in 1999. Tara Miller, owner of the company, founded it when she was just 24 years old.
Although Miller was raised in Gahanna, she set her sights on New Albany in college when her parents built a house in the community.
“New Albany was something I kind of had my eye on because it seemed like there wasn’t a lot out here at that time,” Miller says. “Obviously, we have grown as the community has grown.”
At Broadway Bound, roughly 10 percent of students are enrolled on the competitive team. Unlike other studios and dance-related establishments, the New Albany Ballet Company does not have a competitive division. Miller says she wants her students to have just one competitor: themselves.
“They are taught to train to be better than they were yesterday, but not necessarily better than the child across the room,” she says.
Courtesy of Todd Sloan
Children aren’t the only ones benefiting from the flourishing New Albany dance scene. New Vision Dance Company, founded in Seattle in 2006 by Melissa Gould, artistic director for the company, has established a firm presence since settling in New Albany in 2013.
A nonprofit since 2017, New Vision has over 30 members, Gould says, all participating in the company on a volunteer basis. Gould says her goal has always been to serve adults who have dance in their hearts but who may not have pursued it professionally.
“Once they go to college,” she says, “they decide, ‘OK, well, you know, a dance career is hard, and it’s not the most secure thing in the world. So I’m going to become a nurse, or I’m going to become a school teacher, or I’m going to be a hairstylist,’ and they’re still amazing dancers. It’s just they don’t have that outlet anymore to do what they love.”
However, the environment Gould has built through New Vision is not the same as the dance environment she had growing up. An inescapable combination of ballet and jazz coupled with a less-than-ideal studio culture got in the way of the love Gould would eventually find for dance.
“I did my first recital, and what my mother tells me is that I told her, ‘I hate dance, dancing is stupid, I don’t ever want to dance again,’” she says.
She eventually grew fond of the art form and would major in it in college before pursuing other professional goals in dance. Still, Gould says her true love lies in choreography. Getting to watch other people live out the unique visions she has for their movements – hence, the name of the nonprofit – is something that has always interested her.
“I coached my first cheerleading squad when I was 15. … I started teaching dance at, like, 18 years old,” Gould says. “Choreography was the No. 1 thing I was always concerned with in college as a dance major, … so even loving dance, I love choreography even more.”
Sue Porter, executive director of BalletMet, shares Gould’s love of choreography. Porter got involved with BalletMet in the late ’90s after she was invited to be on the board of trustees. She has remained involved with the organization since then and says spreading the beauty of dance throughout central Ohio alongside artistic director Edwaard Liang has been wonderful.
Despite having a downtown workplace, Porter has been a resident of New Albany for over 20 years and says the dance scene in the community has clearly expanded over the years.
“Certainly, I think that that dance has increased,” Porter says. “We are so lucky to have organizations … and other groups that are doing more work in this area, and I think it’s a credit to our whole community because it really takes a community’s support to support dance.”
Dance has found strong roots in New Albany in part because of new studios and companies and also, in part, because dance is inherently something anyone can find value in, Porter says.
“The wonderful thing about dance is it is movement, it is a wonderful form of expression, and quite honestly, anybody can do it,” Porter says. “I think that it’s a universal language.”
Photo by Jen Zmuda
Tess Wells is a senior editorial assistant. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
