The school day starts a little differently for students at DASH Academy in Plano. It starts with dance class and rehearsal.
"DASH Academy is a daytime program for pre-professional dancers," DASH Academy Co-founder and Executive Director Lindsey Morgan said. "So dance is the commonality that brings everyone here, but we're able to teach them so much more than just the steps, just the choreography."
Students between the ages of 12 and 18 take dance and composition classes along with structured online academics.
"We were amazed at how many kids were homeschooling here but maybe doing it with a little less structure and not having as much of an organization around it," DASH Academy Co-founder and Artistic Director Gregory Dolbashian said. "We want to build leaders. Everything that we try to approach here is helping just foster and encourage any type of leadership skills."
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Whether that's in rehearsals, communicating with other dancers as a team, or developing emotional intelligence to balance their dance dreams with academic needs.
"They love dancing. They don't always love to do the math and the science and the reading and the economics," Morgan said. "It is all important and we do feel there is a commonality between the two."
"There's a lot of discipline that we learn," Kyndall Moore, a high school junior from McKinney said. "We take it and we put it out wherever we go."
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Whether that's on the dance floor, networking with people in the industry, or in a career later in life.
"Being able to express myself in a way that ... like poetry," Sophie Carrera, a high school sophomore from Rockwall said. "I think that's what dance is with your body."
The DASH Academy 4th Annual Spring Show and Silent Auction is Thursday, May 16 at 7 p.m. at Moody Performance Hall in Dallas. For tickets click here.
