The founder of Dance & Company, Drew Jones, staunchly believes in the power of dance.
“Dance is a wonderful way to express emotions and feelings that are often too many, [and] too difficult to express verbally,” Jones said.
With a minor in dance and an education major, Jones said she had realized she loved dance more than anything else in the world and ended up teaching dance to fund herself through college.
Rebecca Thomas, the educational director of Dance & Company, founded in 1987, said she started dancing when she was young, and, as Jones did, fell in love immediately.
One of the dance forms staff members, including Thomas, teach is ballet, an artistic dance form full of intricate steps and flowy movements. Though most beginner ballet dancers wear ballet shoes (or flats) for years before advancing, a well-known part of ballet is pointe shoes and the image of a dancer up on pointe. Many dancers go on pointe then stop and decide to return to flats; some don’t even go on pointe at all.
“You can kind of start back at square one on pointe, or you can continue in your flats and probably build that technique a little better,” Thomas said.
Dancers relearn most of ballet when they change to pointe shoes. This is because going up on pointe can be dangerous.
“There is a great deal of pain associated with going up on pointe shoes and the less ready you are the more personal pain. I can remember going home in tears, going home with blood on my toe shoe pads,” Jones said.
“Would we have more of lucrative business here if we were putting every 11-year-old, 12-year-old, and 13-year-old up on pointe? You betcha. But that’s not what we’re gonna do, and that’s not what it’s all about,” Jones said.
As an extra way to be sure the dancers are ready for pointe, they set in place an assessment in 2022.
Sarah Gosselin is in charge of the pointe assessment that Jones and Thomas use as a way to back up their observation of whether or not the dancers are ready for pointe.
“[Gosselin’s] is strength, ours is watching the technique,” Jones said
Jones understands that a five-minute assessment can’t show the full ability of a dancer, but she also knows that it won’t be able to show their strength.
“So we want to make sure absolutely before any student is placed on pointe that their shins, their knees, their hip girdle, their shoulder girdle, everything is absolutely prepared for that. So that these tragedies don’t happen,” Jones said.
Jones wants what’s best for her students and their health.
As Jones said, “There are no set rules for [dancers going on pointe] because the safety of the dancers was utmost, not a set of protocols or policies.”