By Carol Stiffler
Across the area, young girls will go to bed tonight and dream of dancing. Ballet, tap, jazz, lyrical, or acro (stunt-filled, gymnastic-styled dancing) moves will flit through their minds.
They’re dreaming it because they’re doing it. Peninsula Point Dance Studio opened in Newberry last fall, and hundreds of girls and a few boys signed on and filled the studio.
When Jack and Kimberly Sanders posted their intentions to open a dance studio in Newberry, they put the news on Facebook around 10 or 11 p.m. They expected to top out around 40 students.
By midnight, they had 50 students signed up. By morning, they had 60. And last weekend, 173 individual dancers performed in the studio’s first-ever dance recital. The two-day event was held on Friday and Saturday, May 16 and 17, with three performances so everyone who wanted to watch could attend. Tickets sold out promptly, and hundreds of people filled the Engadine Consolidated Schools gymnasium to watch the 22-act spectacle.
That was a dream come true for Kimberly Sanders, who planned the event around that theme: Dreams.
“Everybody has a dream,” she said. “And everybody should be encouraged to follow it. My dream has been to have a safe place for kids to go who will come into a studio and be loved.”
Sanders views the students as if they are her own children, and says she loves them all.
“To watch them grow, that was my dream,” she said. “I wanted that safe place. And I think I’ve built that.”
Ninety percent of the dancers were performing on stage for the first time, she said. Some of them have fallen in love with dancing and it shows. Sanders knows that this year of dance will have a lasting impact on students.
“When we first opened the studio, everybody was a beginner,” she said. “We didn’t know where they were at, level-wise. We did classes by age. We learned this year that’s not going to work. You have kids at all different levels now. Next year our classes will be age-based but also level-based. That will give kids a chance to grow where they are at.”
Dancers were sorted in botanically-themed groups, with the youngest being Sprouts, then Seedlings, then Blossoms. Next year they’ll add a Flowers category for dancers aged 11 and up.
Most classes were full and many had a waiting list this year. Summer classes begin soon, and Sanders reports those are almost completely full, too.
Her husband, Jack, will be teaching aerial silk classes this summer, and gymnastics classes will start soon as well. Tryouts for a 14-spot competition team are coming up. Sign-ups for next year’s classes begin on June 1, and Sanders encourages families to sign up promptly if they’d like a space in a specific class.
She credits a team of growing staff and “dance moms” for being a great help this year and during the recital. Managing a dance studio and putting on a recital was all new for the Sanders family, who had extensive dance experience but had never managed the business of dance before.
“Without the community and these dance moms that have stepped up, I can’t imagine how it would have been if I would have tried [to do it alone] all year,” said Kimberly, who taught 17 classes each week. “To watch this grow, and people step up and say ‘Hey, I’ll teach this for you next year,’ it fills my heart.”
Sanders hopes her students appreciate dance for the rest of their lives.
“My hope is that they will take the skill I gave them and move on with it,” she said. “I grew up dancing in a studio. The love of dance that I have, I took with me. That’s what I want for everybody else: Take that love of dance and take it forward for the future.”
