About DanceVisions
A Community Dance Center

​

DanceVisions was started with the help of the City of Palo Alto.  In the early 1990’s the city wanted to help the arts community and also to make use of the space made available by the closure of Cubberley High School. Dance teachers in the area were invited to work together to form a plan to develop a community dance center.  Their original vision was to use the entire L wing of Cubberley.  After several meetings the group finally broke into 3 groups: those dancers who chose to keep the spaces they already were using, Zohar who opted to rent part of the L wing, and a small group who wanted to become the community dance center that the city had envisioned. L-3 was designated as that space and the work of setting up a brand new dance studio was begun.

 

Most of that work was done by Jancy Limpert and Tance Johnson, our founders, who put their own money and physical labor into laying the sprung wood floor, covering it with marley flooring, buying and hanging mirrors, and constructing barres.  The city very generously gave them a year of no rent to get set up and started.  After that in 1992, the fledgling DanceVisions opened .

 

Part of the idea of the community dance space was to have a place where dancers could choreograph, rehearse, and perform.  Of course, part for the original idea of a community dance space was to offer a wide variety of classes to the community.  We started mostly with the standards- modern dance and ballet.  Soon we had a grant to bring in children from the nearby Besse Bolten Childcare Center. The second year we started children’s ballet and modern dance classes.  And the studio just kept growing.

 

We currently offer adult classes in Ballet, Modern, Contemporary, Hip Hop, Lyrical, Jazz, Middle Eastern, and Tap; we offer children’s classes in Modern, Ballet, and Creative Dance.  We also have 3 resident modern dance companies and 2 different Chinese dance groups that rehearse in our space. 

 

DanceVisions is an inclusive and welcoming place; our classes and performances are open to all ages and abilities.  We have at least 3 performances a year with an amazing array of variety.  A typical program will have a group of 5 year old beginner ballet students, a professional modern dance group, a solo Classical Indian dancer, an adult hip hop group, teenage ballet students en pointe, very enthusiastic adult tappers, and more. We encourage all of our students to perform no matter the age or ability level, and we all cheer each other on.  Audience members are exposed to styles and art forms they may never have seen or even heard of before and sometimes decide to join a class as a result.

​

Dance Classes for Everyone

​

To read about our Covid precautions, please click here.

​

​

​

​