Welcome to Our Blog!
The Dance Initiative - Feb 1, 2022
Hello movement lovers!
We are thrilled to be starting a new venture with TDI, by keeping our valued followers, clients, and supporters up-to-date with a monthly blog post. We’re so excited to use this platform to keep you all informed about upcoming events, and engaged in stories, experiences, and more!
There’s no better place to start, then at the beginning. Follow along this timeline of how TDI came to be!
Summer of 2019 - early 2020
Aidan and Jennah begin their business partnership. After many years of dancing together, supporting one another as friends, and discussing their big ideas for the business they hoped to own “one day”, they finally put these ambitions into action. Many hours were spent developing Day of Dance programming, legalities, banking details, website domains, marketing materials, and more!
March 2nd 2020
Day of Dance is finally launched to the public! Studio owners across Alberta are invited to join us on this new journey as Alberta’s premier travelling dance masterclass program! With the goal of providing new experiences to dancers in Albertan communities, Aidan and Jennah launched Day of Dance as a one-of-a-kind, two-day workshop program geared toward presenting all dancers with a unique, exciting, and challenging approach to their training. Friends, family, and industry leaders were thrilled about this new endeavour and tentative plans for Day of Dance workshops began to develop soon after launching the program.
Mid-March - May 2020
The threat of COVID-19 officially enters Alberta and the ambitions of spending the summer of 2020 travelling across Alberta to teach dance began to diminish. However, we didn’t launch the business just to put it on pause. Aidan and Jennah continued to spread the word about Day of Dance with the goal of keeping Albertan dancers connected through the first wave of the pandemic. In the spring of 2020, Day of Dance hosted two wonderful online workshops, and launched their first merchandise line.
August 2020
The very first Day of Dance event, in-person, sponsored by our amazing teammates at Motives Dance and Fitness! A great two days of dancing and exercising with local movers of all ages!
Fall 2020 / Winter 2021
Day of Dance begins to offer online, int/adv drop-in classes, and short virtual dance sessionals for kids. A highlight was welcoming McKayla Smith onto our faculty and seeing her first online class bring dancers together from coast-to-coast, via ZOOM! During this winter lockdown, Aidan and Jennah began to re-visit their business goals and look for new ways to offer expanded services while travel is limited and the future of the pandemic effects were unknown. We knew we wanted to keep dancing with everyone, and continue to share our passion for movement and connecting dancers from across Alberta (Western Canada), we had to figure out a new way to do so!
March 2021
Day of Dance has officially rebranded to become The Dance Initiative!
The expanded program offerings of The Dance Initiative were always long-term goals for Aidan and Jennah.
From then until now…
Since we launched The Dance Initiative, we have had so many wonderful experiences with dancers, colleagues, and friends within the Albertan dance community. We were tremendously excited to host a one-of-a-kind elite training program for advanced competitive dancers, called Artists in Action that kicked off the launch of TDI, as well as our one-year anniversary as an established dance program. Artists in Action served us 2 main purposes. Firstly, it brought the Albertan dance community together by inviting dancers from different studios to collect as one group, and put a show together in just 6 weeks. Secondly, the Artists in Action program provided the dancers with a unique and exciting choreography intensive challenge, that compliments the training done at their home studios. We are so excited for the future of Artists in Action!
We were also able to continue to host Day of Dance events throughout Alberta during 2021, and were fortunate to host our program in Edmonton, and in Lloydminster at the Alison Lamont School of Dance.
We can look back to our early teenager years and remember exactly how we would plan out our “future dance studio.” To see those dreams come a reality is simply outstanding. And we would not be here today without the support from each and every one of you.