Avery Thompson arrives at the Okemah City Dance Academy every Saturday morning at 8 a.m., an hour before her first class. The 16-year-old uses the quiet time to stretch in Studio 3, a former freight elevator shaft in what was once a wholesale grocery warehouse. The original brick walls are still exposed, now insulated and painted slate gray. At 8:45, the sprung-floor studios begin to fill with the thud of pointe shoes and the bass lines of hip-hop warm-ups.
Five years ago, this building sat empty on the edge of downtown. Today, it houses the fastest-growing dance program in a city of 47,000 that has never been known for producing professional performers.
A Bet on Dance in a Smaller Market
The academy's expansion is part of a broader, uneven effort to revive Okemah City's downtown. In 2019, the city council approved a $340,000 arts infrastructure grant funded by a downtown tax increment district. The academy received $120,000 of that pool, enough to renovate the warehouse and add five studios, a 90-seat black-box theater, and locker rooms. Enrollment has since doubled, from 140 students to 284.
But growth has not been simple. Okemah City sits 90 minutes from the nearest major metropolitan area, too far for convenient master classes with visiting choreographers. Professional performance opportunities are scarce. And the academy faces stiff competition from two established regional schools in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, both of which actively recruit Okemah students with scholarship offers.
"We're fighting the assumption that you have to leave to get serious training," says Elena Voss, the academy's artistic director, who left a company position in Chicago to return to her hometown in 2018. "Our bet is that you can build something rigorous here, but you have to be creative about resources."
Technology as a Substitute for Proximity
That resourcefulness is most visible in the academy's technology program, which Voss launched in 2022 with a $15,000 rural arts innovation grant from the state arts council.
In a corner studio, students strap on Meta Quest headsets and run choreography inside a virtual theater, complete with lighting and audience sightlines. The system, built on a motion-capture platform called Move.ai, records their movements and generates skeletal-overlay videos they can study on tablets. Instructors review the footage during weekly one-on-one sessions.
"The first time I used it, I realized I'd been cheating my arabesque for two years," Thompson says. "You can't argue with the line when it's drawn over your body."
The equipment is not professional-studio grade—Voss is quick to note the latency issues and the limited library of virtual stages—but it has changed how students prepare for competitions and college auditions. Last spring, three academy seniors recorded motion-capture prescreening videos that helped them secure spots at summer intensives in New York and Los Angeles.
Not everyone is convinced. Marcus Chen, a parent whose daughter studies ballet at the academy, questions whether the technology budget could have been spent on live instruction. "It's flashy," Chen says. "I wonder if we're substituting gadgets for the kind of mentorship you get when a teacher is actually in the room."
Voss counters that the VR equipment is used to supplement, not replace, in-person training. "We can't fly in a Broadway choreographer every month," she says. "This lets our students rehearse in a proscenium theater without leaving Okemah."
Three Dancers, Three Paths
Thompson is one of three students who have emerged as barometers of what the academy might become. She rehearses six days a week, maintains a 3.9 GPA, and recently won a regional youth ballet scholarship that covers her summer training at a company school in Cincinnati.
Miles Rodriguez, 17, represents the academy's commercial track. He teaches a beginner hip-hop class on Saturday mornings for elementary students, many of whom attend on full scholarship. In March, a video of his choreography for the academy's spring showcase was shared by a talent scout who books dancers for arena tours; Rodriguez is now in preliminary conversations about backup dancer auditions after graduation.
"I used to think I'd have to move to Atlanta or L.A. to get noticed," Rodriguez says. "Now I'm not sure I need to leave immediately. The training here is real."
Lila Nguyen, 15, came to contemporary dance after three years of competitive gymnastics. She performs with a compulsion that instructors describe as unusually raw for her age. At a community outreach event last fall—a free performance in Okemah's Central Park that drew an estimated 400 attendees—Nguyen improvised a solo on stage after a music cue failed. She kept the audience for six unplanned minutes.
"I didn't think," Nguyen says. "I just stayed in the moment. That's what contemporary dance teaches you—to
