Tripping the light fantastic: A waltz through the history of dance at UCalgary

Whether performed as a sacred ritual or as a spur-of-the-moment spin around the living room to our favourite pop song, dance is embedded in the fabric of our lives.

From traditional folk dances and Broadway musicals to the latest TikTok viral sensations, it reflects both cultural and personal identity and is a deep source of joy and communication.

For professor emeritae Anne Flynn and Michele Moss, dance is their profession. They also shared their extensive knowledge with thousands of students who took their classes in the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Arts and Faculty of Kinesiology.

Dance programming has a rich history at UCalgary dating back to 1965 when Dr. Sylvia Shaw, PhD, was first hired by what was then known as the Faculty of Physical Education (now Kinesiology) to teach social dance and folk dances in addition to coaching women’s athletics. 

Thanks to a small collective of full-time faculty members, the programs have grown substantially and Flynn and Moss remain committed to developing future dance teachers, choreographers, performers and scholars. 

“I think we love being together, and jumping off each other’s spark,” Moss says. “We inspire each other — there’s a magic in dance.”

Building on the extensive collaborations and community partnerships developed in dance’s 60-year history on campus, Flynn and Moss believe UCalgary is the perfect place to start something even bigger in the Canadian dance landscape.

In a New York minute

How Flynn and Moss even came to meet each other and become fast friends was serendipity of sorts.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Flynn grew up with a dance studio on her street and memories of seeing the Rockettes performing at Radio City Music Hall. “Social dancing was just a part of the fabric of our postwar world,” she says.  

After graduating from State University of New York in 1977, Flynn joined UCalgary’s Faculty of Physical Education, which had begun offering Canada’s first dance education major a year earlier.

An international influence

UCalgary alum Moss, BEd’84, MA’07, considers herself lucky that her parents always recognized the value of dance and music as a positive outlet of expression.

They lived in England for the first few years of her life before they moved to Montreal, where Moss remembers falling in love with dance at a school called the Negro Community Centre.

“I got to have teachers of colour and learned how to tap dance, jazz dance. The stars really aligned for me,” she says.

Moss came to UCalgary after a summer working at Wapta Lodge in B.C. She originally didn’t know about the dance program until her first day on campus, then got in line to change her registration.

She remembers the first time she met Flynn, recalling immediately “sitting up straight and paying attention” to her new instructor, hoping to impress Flynn as she appreciated her attitude and vision for dance as an artform, as well as an outlet for community health and wellness.

Embedded in the community

Filled with her knowledge of post-secondary dance-education programs in the U.S., Flynn says her goal was always to foster programming that took the best of all influences.

“There’s a vast difference between access to dance at the post-secondary level in the United States,” she says. “Their degree programs started in the mid-1920’s, while the first dance degree program in Canada was launched in 1971 at York University.”

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, UCalgary’s dance programs developed separately in the faculties of Fine Arts and Physical Education, with Fine Arts emphasizing theatrical dance forms and pre-professional studies, while Physical Education focused on dance in education such as creative dance, folk dance and social dances.

Flynn advocated for combining the existing resources in each faculty — an alignment that, to the dance community’s delight, eventually came to fruition in 1996 with its first collaborative four-year Bachelor of Arts in dance, one of only a handful of dance degree programs in Canada.

Over the years, new degree streams have been added, including a Bachelor of Fine Arts in dance, a joint Bachelor of Kinesiology/Bachelor of Arts in dance, and a Bachelor of Dance/Bachelor of Education.

Many new courses were also created in hip hop, world dance forms, dances for the camera, and dance science, to name a few. Flynn says dance is closely tied to its social context and post-secondary programs in dance are always evolving. 

Moss says some of the growth can be attributed to the partnerships found in the community.

The city’s renowned Decidedly Jazz Danceworks (DJD) started on campus when dance instructor and UCalgary alum Vicki Adams Willis, BFA’72, started choreographing the annual Mainstage production. The company’s co-founders, Moss and Hannah Stilwell, BA’85, were her undergraduate students.

A community fixture, Dance Montage, was also born out of UCalgary and played to sold-out audiences from 1969 to 2019, while Mainstage Dance lives on as the annual venue for dance majors to work with professional choreographers.

Other established dance organizations like Dancers’ Studio West, Springboard Dance, and Alberta Dance Theatre for Young People all had connections to campus, as have recent programs such as Dancing Parkinson’s YYC, University Heights Dancing, East Side Dance Festival’s Forging Futures in Dance, and the Dance Division's recently launched Movement Research Festival (MoRF), which includes both conference and performance offerings.

Another key attribute of dance at UCalgary has been involvement with young people, with faculty members visiting local schools over the years to showcase its importance to health and vitality.

“I was just in a high school, and I told the students that their assignment was to bring some dance to the hallways,” Moss says.

The dance program has a vibrant history of offering travel studies, taking students to places like Guinea, Senegal, Cuba and Poland over the years, where students experience local cultures and their specific dance forms.

Most impressively, Flynn says, the programs have produced upwards of 400 graduates who are bringing dance back into their local communities.

Making a ‘scene’

As the artform continues to adapt and change with each generation, Flynn says, “dancing is a renewable resource,” and Calgary is in a unique position to build its dance brand further.

“In my dream scenario, public health and public education would embrace dance in a way that has yet to happen in this province and country,” Flynn says. “Every child should have access to high-quality dance education.”

From elementary school to university, Moss adds it would be an opportunity to bring together the many facets of dance education in the city, showing off the breadth and depth of its impact in our multicultural society. 

“There are so many kinds and flavours and approaches and venues and places where you can be in dance,” she says. “Let’s make a scene in Calgary.”