About Us
Blacksburg Dance Theater (formerly New River Moving Arts) is a school and performing company founded and operated by modern dancers. While we offer a variety of dance techniques and styles, we adhere to the following principles of modern dance in all of our technique offerings and performance opportunities:
Our Mission
1. We honor the unique body stories of each individual dancer. Our curriculum supports the development of dancers as artists, independent thinkers and versatile practitioners of a variety of movement forms.
2. We emphasize safe musculoskeletal alignment in all of our classes, especially when working with hip and knee rotation, i.e. “turnout.” We work with each individual dancer to find and support their own unique, dynamic alignment.
3. We embrace deep rigor in artistic practice, but we also acknowledge that developmentally, many children are not ready to receive codified dance “technique” until after kindergarten. As such, our classes for children under the age of seven emphasize joyful expression and creative movement; after the age of seven, we gradually increase emphasis on technical mastery of movement in a variety of styles, while maintaining a sense of play and creative inquiry in classes for all ages.
4. We strive to create low-pressure performance opportunities that allow dancers to build confidence and feel successful on their own terms.