Twice a week, Bethany Skvortsova gets a break while her young daughters put on rainbow tutus and learn how to dance in Del Ray.
Her seven-year-old appreciates being taken seriously as a dancer, Skvortsova says. At the moment, her daughter is rehearsing for The Nutcracker, which the school will be performing this year on the main stage of Capital One Hall in Tysons.
“Tuesday is our favorite day of the week,” she said. “My older daughter’s really excited that someone’s teaching her how to do it and telling her that this is the right way or this is the wrong way, and then she teaches her little (three-year-old) sister how to do those things as well.”
The Dance Academy of Virginia (DAV) opened a year and a half ago in the former home of Yoga In Daily Life, located at 2402 Mount Vernon Avenue. The number of kids learning ballet, pointe, contemporary, jazz, lyrical, hip-hop, tap, and musical theater at the academy has grown to about 450.
“I’m just amazed with everything that happens over there,” Skvortsova. “I thought it was going to be kind of a stereotypical dance school, and really, I’m constantly impressed with how well they’re doing.”
A professional dancer for decades, Katherine Horrigan, the founder, is the former director of the Adagio Ballet School of Dance in Arlington. When that school closed during the pandemic in 2020, Horrigan founded the first Dance Academy of Virginia location in McLean.
“We believe these children have bright futures and dance is preparing them,” Horrigan said. “We’re helping them through the work ethic, the perseverance, the attention to detail. We’re training them for success in anything they pursue.”
Maryanne Mitchem, DAV’s director of operations, said that it takes time to teach children body language.
“It’s like learning how to read or learning how to write,” Mitchem said. “There’s a language to ballet. There’s language to dance. It’s about learning the positions and the names of the movements. As you go through all of those steps, as you go through all of those levels and all those classes, you go from learning individual steps to then learning how to put them together.”
Combined, the Del Ray and McLean locations are currently teaching about 1,300 children, Mitchem said.
Horrigan said she’s considering opening another location.
“There are opportunities out there, and they’re coming, which is interesting,” she said. “People are inviting me to look at spaces, but I have the vision that might get even larger, I’m working first on making sure our current two facilities have the best team.”
