The Geographic Puzzle
Watertown sits 300 miles north of Manhattan, closer to the Canadian border than to Broadway. It is a city of roughly 25,000 people, best known for Fort Drum and the Thousand Islands. It is not, by any conventional measure, part of New York City's dance ecosystem. Yet a cluster of small studios here has begun drawing attention from choreographers and talent scouts based in the five boroughs—not because Watertown has become an extension of the city, but because a handful of determined practitioners are building something self-sufficient and exporting it south.
The question is not whether Watertown is the new Brooklyn. It is whether a small upstate city can cultivate dancers good enough, and ideas original enough, to matter to an industry concentrated hundreds of miles away.
The Studios: Names, Spaces, and Claims
Three studios currently dominate Watertown's dance landscape: Black River Dance Collective, North Country Movement Project, and Velocity Studio Arts. Each makes a different wager on how to train dancers and what kind of work to produce.
Black River Dance Collective
Founded in 2016 by Maya Torres, a former Mark Morris Dance Group administrator who relocated upstate for family reasons, Black River operates out of a renovated warehouse on Factory Street. The studio serves roughly 90 students, ages four to adult, and runs a tuition-assistance program funded by a local foundation. Torres, 42, is explicit about her ambitions.
"We are not trying to replicate Juilliard up here," she said during a recent interview. "We are trying to train bodies that can adapt—to concert dance, to commercial work, to whatever comes next. Three of our alumni are now dancing in New York City. That is our proof of concept."
The alumni Torres names are Jared Okonkwo, currently in the second company at Alvin Ailey; Sofia Vargas, a freelance contemporary dancer based in Ridgewood, Queens; and Darnell Ellis, who books commercial and music-video work through an agency in Midtown. All three confirmed their training histories independently. None said Watertown was a direct pipeline to their current jobs, but all credited Torres with providing intensive technical training they could not have afforded in New York City.
Black River's facilities are conventional: sprung floors, mirrors, ballet barres, a small black-box theater with seating for eighty. There is no virtual reality rig, no motion-capture lab. Torres has experimented with video projection in two student pieces, using software she learned in a free online course. "I would not call it groundbreaking," she said. "I would call it resourceful."
North Country Movement Project
If any Watertown organization lives up to the "innovation" label, it is North Country Movement Project, founded in 2019 by choreographer Dr. Elias Forrester, who holds a Ph.D. in performance studies from Northwestern and teaches remotely for a university in Chicago. Forrester, 35, arrived in Watertown by accident—his partner was stationed at Fort Drum—and built a practice that deliberately exploits his geographic isolation.
Forrester's signature work, Residual Heat (2022), uses infrared sensors to track dancers' body temperatures and projects the data as shifting color fields behind the performers. The piece has toured to small venues in Rochester, Syracuse, and, in February 2023, to Jack Crystal Theater at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. The Tisch booking came through a former classmate of Forrester's who now programs there.
"The technology is not sophisticated," Forrester said. "It is a $400 sensor and open-source visualization software. But the constraint forced me to think about what the audience is actually seeing. I am less interested in the gadget than in the question it opens up: What if the dancer's physiology became part of the set design?"
Forrester has no permanent studio. He rehearses in borrowed spaces—churches, a yoga studio, occasionally a hockey rink in Alexandria Bay. He employs no full-time staff. North Country Movement Project is, by his own description, a "nomadic research unit" rather than a conventional school.
Velocity Studio Arts
Velocity Studio Arts, opened in 2021 by former Radio City Rockette Candice Huang, occupies a more commercial position. Huang, 38, offers classes in ballet, jazz, hip-hop, and musical theater, with a sharp focus on preparing students for college dance programs and industry auditions. Her studio's website explicitly promises "NYC-level training without the NYC price tag."
Huang's most visible graduate to date is Kaylee Brennan, 19, who enrolled at Pace University's commercial dance program in fall 2023. Brennan, who grew up in Sackets Harbor, a village ten miles from Watertown
