Mary Ann Fortune's Dance Std

With inspiration from gymnastic floor work and rhythmic gymnastics, this dance style incorporates acrobatic movement into elegant flowing routines, with creative, expressive lifts and poses. Requiring strength, flexibility and technique, Gymnastic Dance produces inspiring performances for the dancer and audience.

Contemporary dance is an expressive style of dance that abandons the rigid, centered aspect of classical forms of dance, and utilizes unconventional movements from styles around the world. It incorporates certain elements of ballet, modern dance, and jazz.

Lyrical dance is a dance style that embodies various aspects of ballet, jazz, acrobatics, and modern dance. Lyrical dance is strongly associated with clearly displayed emotional moods, fast-moving choreographic strategies, emphasis on virtuosic display, illustration of song lyrics, and, in group form, exact unison. The style is usually danced at a faster pace than ballet but not as fast as jazz. Lyrical dance is a category typically found in dance competitions.

Jazz dance is an umbrella term encompassing several different styles of dance that became popular in the early 20th-century. Though jazz dance has mixed roots extending back through both African and European traditions, it's a uniquely American creation, which developed simultaneously with jazz music in New Orleans. Eventually, this kind of social song and dance became popularized beyond the African American communities, especially as Southern blacks migrated to Northern cities during the Great Migration. Social dances like the Charleston and the Jitterbug caught on. In the 1940s, the improvised, social aspect of jazz dance began to be replaced with intricate choreography as more dancers with training in ballet and Modern took up the dance form, especially on Broadway stages. Today, jazz dance continues to evolve and blend with other dance styles — for example, street jazz and theatre dance. However, true to its roots, jazz dance continues to hearken back to the ethnic eclecticism that birthed it.

The history of hip hop is distinctly American, though, like other "distinctly American" forms of dance, its roots extend back through jazz to African dance. In the 1960s in New York City, the uprock and breaking dance styles started to develop alongside hip hop music. At the same time, dancers in California, inspired by Hollywood robots, were working on dance moves to imitate them through locking and popping. In the 1970s, professional street-based dance crews emerged and popularized these various subcategories of hip-hop. As hip hop gained ground in the American cultural imagination, dancers blended the two different coast styles into one big genre of hip hop.

Classical ballet is the foundation from which nearly all dance styles have developed. It requires strong technique, athleticism, and grace. Originating in the Italian Renaissance courts of the 15th century, ballet de cour began as a casual pastime before Catherine de Medici, an ardent patron of the arts in Florence, helped develop it into a cohesive form performance complete with themes, geometric choreography, and theatrical elements.

Like jazz, tap dance was born from a fusion of European and West African cultures. In the mid-1600s, slaves in the Southern United States began to imitate the jigs and social dances of the Irish and Scottish, combining them with the West African Juba dance. In the middle of the 19th-century, this evolving style of dance made its way onto the stage with the rise of minstrel shows.

Focus of class is to build agility and strength through basic to advanced tumbling skills. Class begins with center floor warm up, then tumbling and apparatus work.

This style of dance is very expressive and combines the elements of modern, jazz, lyrical and classical ballet connecting the mind and body through fluid dance movements.

This style of dance is a fusion of ballet, jazz, and contemporary. The lyrical dancer will become emotionally connected to the music and will use movement to convey the emotional content.

Jazz dance is an umbrella term encompassing several different styles of dance that became popular in the early 20th-century with mixed roots of both African and European traditions.

HIP Hop is a style of dance that originated from street dancers and break dancing. Since then it has evolved into an art form seen in many music videos, stage and screen.

Elegant, beautiful, and seemingly effortless, ballet is a very traditional Western dance form that requires strength, precision, and dedication from its students.

An art form that can be heard. Your feet are the musical instruments and through shading, the dancer can create the dynamics of sound and through syncopation various rhythms.