In 2004, I was coming home from a dance performance at a small venue in San Francisco with my friends…we were talking about the performance… I was thinking –  there are so many difficulties for a dancer / choreographer to put on a performance…and at the same time there is so much fabulous dancing in class and rehearsal… What if we all just stopped to dance  wherever we are in our daily lives?  – no tech, costumes or theatre…Just a moment of dance all together, to remind ourselves of the joy we felt when we first began to dance and remember why we became dancers. …So back in 2005, with a lot of encouragement from friends including Joan Lazarus and Barbara Kaplan…dance anywhere® had it’s first incarnation.

…just stopped to dance

The first performance I created was along College Avenue from Russell Street in Berkeley to the corner of College Avenue and Claremont Avenue in Oakland with at least one dancer on every corner of the eight  intersections…

                            Katherine with Diane McKallip  /  photo: Mike DiFilippo

       dance anywhere® on College Ave. / Oakland- Berkeley, CA / photo: Mike DiFilippo   

That first year, we got the word out through email, print media and Bay Area National Dance Week. There were dances around the Bay Area and in Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Ohio, Ithaca NY, Chicago (Axis Dance Company),New Jersey, Kansas City, Kansas and Switzerland.

So from one small, whimsical idea…dance anywhere® began.