News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
Visions of sugarplums will dance in your head, and on the Sisters Middle School stage, as The Sisters Dance Academy presents "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" on Saturday, December 12, at 6 p.m.
The poem will be narrated by Jim Anderson and enacted by the dancers in Lonnie Liddell's academy.
"Each dance coordinates with the poem," Liddell said. "It should be a really fun, festive recital."
The recital is the latest effort from what has become a thriving dance school in Sisters.
Liddell moved to Sisters three years ago from Utah.
"My husband's family lives here, and whenever we visited we just loved Sisters," she said. "We just thought it was the neatest community."
Liddell has trained in classical ballet, jazz, tap and ballroom dancing with the Morca Dance Academy, Visions Dance Company of Canada, The Nancy White School of Ballet and Elizabeth Roper's School of Ballet. She got back into teaching after the move to Sisters. For a time she taught at Dancerfly Studio, then started teaching out of her home.
"I'd just push all the furniture aside and had about eight girls in our living room," she said.
Encouraged by the response to her teaching, Liddell started The Sisters Dance Academy, renting space at Cascade Fitness.
She opened last February with 50 students and now has 72.
Sharri Bertagna, who danced for 10 years on the Tueller School of Dance competitive team, assists Liddell in teaching the kids.
There are no adult classes yet, but Liddell said that "that's in the works for 2010."
New classes will get underway in January. Liddell is launching a new Web site this week at http://www.sistersdanceacademy.com, where you can find class descriptions and schedules.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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