Hello! We’re Shantal Moody and Christine Comtois, two Tri-Cities moms who met in 2016 while our kids played together at the library park.

We both went to college for dance, me at UCO and Shantal at BYU, and learned about this amazing thing called creative dance. It was through creative dance that we saw kids learn about dance and art in a way that reached them on a personal level and literally change their life. It made such an impact on us, that when we moved to the Tri-Cities and didn’t see any creative dance, we decided to just make our own.

In the summer of 2017, we held our first summer camps outside at Howard Amon Park. It went pretty well, but I’ll never forget when we had to dance 10 feet from the port-a-potty, because they were setting up for Art In The Park, starting later that day.

We had a small problem though… not many people understood what creative dance was and we honestly weren’t great at explaining it in terms parents understood. Classes were fairly small, but they were also mostly people we knew (big shout out to our all friends and family that supported us in that first year!).

But we got better at explaining creative dance. Basically when you are little (5 and under), learning things like how to point your toe isn’t helpful because you physically can’t do it; then you develop bad habits. But if you start with the elements of dance and build a solid foundation with games, improv and exploration, then you have everything you need to become a technical dancer around 1st grade.

For our middle and high-school students though, creative dance looks different. It’s actually learning to choreograph, applying elements of dance to technique, and learning to improvise. What’s interesting is that when our students focus on these things, they become more grounded in themselves as people and that is really what dance is about!

Now we are hyper-focused on offering incredibly fun dance classes for busy families who value creativity and technique. We also try our best to make it as easy on parents as possible, because we know how hard #adulting can be!

Thrive Dance is here to help your child grow their love of dance and their technique so that then they can become more courageous, creative, and empowered.

If you’d like to see the classes offered for your dancer click the button below to contact us and we will respond with a personalized class list just for your dancer within 24 hours (except Sundays; it’s our day off!).