Cool Careers: Dance Instructor

By: Nicola Pioppi

Anne Pavlick has always known that she wants
to work with children, and she’s been dancing
since she was seven.  It makes sense then, that
she works as a dance instructor for middle
schoolers.

Anne teaches “creative movement” at Propel
Charter Schools of Pittsburgh, where she
focuses on combining the subjects kids are
learn about in school with dance movements.
Creative movement involves “moving your
body in a non-pedestrian way”.  Anne explained that it is “one step up
from every day actions”. For example, if students were studying numbers,
the class that week would have a strong emphasis on counting.  One
lesson plan was centered around magnets; after teaching students about
the way magnets work, the students were each assigned a polarity and
then had to interact with each other as magnets.  

Although she is teaching dance, which might sound more exciting than
English or math, Anne has a schedule similar to that of other teachers;
she teaches four class periods a day, five days a week. She is also assigned
a daily lunch duty. She will teach at three different schools throughout
the year, for twelve weeks at a time. Anne also dances professionally with
the Pillow Project, a contemporary jazz company.  She dances with the
group at least three times a week, in addition to performing in shows.

                                         So how did she get here?

Like many dancers, Anne has been
dancing from a very young age: “I’ve
been dancing since I was seven.  I did
the whole tap, jazz, ballet thing, and in
middle school I danced with a
‘preprofessional ballet company’”.  

“I’ve always known I wanted to work
with kids,” Anne says, “I stopped taking
dance lessons for awhile in high school,
but I’ve taught dance since I was a
freshman in high school, when I taught tap to home schoolers.”  But she
wasn’t always sure that she wanted her career to include dancing.  She
received her undergraduate degree at the University of Pittsburgh, which
doesn’t offer a dance major.  So, she majored in art history and pursued a
dance minor.

“In my senior year I realized [dancing] was something I really wanted to
pursue.” This was the year she began teaching creative movement to
urban youth from a nearby community, and she also took a dance-heavy
course load.  Anne was a member of the Pitt Dance Ensemble, a group
which meets once a week, and each week a different style of dance is
taught.  At the end of the year, the group puts on a two-hour show of
dances choreographed and performed by the students in the ensemble.  In
addition to all the dancing she was doing in school, Anne was taking
classes at the Pitt Ballet Theater, dancing ballet, and Attack Theater,
studying modern dance.  She also apprenticed at the Pillow Project, which
led to a position as an official member of the company.  It was the Attack
Theater director who recommended her to Propel Schools.

Anne didn’t just wake up one day and decide that dancing seemed like a
good career to go into. In fact, it might seem like everything in Anne’s life
has led her to her current career, but she’s worked hard to get where she
is.  “It was all about networking,” she says.  A friend offered her a job
teaching tap in high school; the dance classes at the Pillow Project led to a
professional dancing positions, and a friend telling her about a position
available at a local school plus a good word from the director led to a job
teaching dance.  So if this is a career you think you want to pursue,
remember to keep at it.  Don’t let your dancing be just a job; remember
that you can make a career out of dancing.