Miss Nicole

As I stood on relevé, beads of sweat dripping down my spine, I thought back to the beginning of class: “Today isn’t going to be that hard. I really want you guys to just dance and feel it.” Not even halfway through warm-up, I was already pink in the face. “Not that hard,” sure. I followed the younger dancers in front of me, who knew the choreographed warm-up by heart, and out of my peripheral vision, I saw Nicole Klett—known to her students as “Miss Nicole”—walking around, correcting students’ body positioning. She would lightly press down on tense shoulders, or tap one hip to signal pulling up through it, or push an extended leg to lift it higher. As she called out signal words to guide the class, her voice was calm but demanded respect. A balance, I later learned, she has been working on for years.

Along with being the Artistic Director of Capitol Movement, Inc. (CMI), a Washington, DC-based dance organization founded by Stephanie Jojokian and Amber Yancey, Klett is a recent co-founder of The Movement Studios, a dance studio located in Springfield, Virginia. After a long night of teaching (and for me, a long hour of taking her contemporary class), she met up with me in her brightly-lit, organized office; I sat at the round table beside her desk, only slightly cluttered by some stray papers to be filled out by faculty members. Hair pulled back into a low ponytail and wearing rectangular, black-rimmed glasses, Klett sat down at the same table. She was still wearing black leggings and a white, v-neck t-shirt from teaching, and was barefoot. I first joked about how unexpectedly difficult the class was for me, to which Klett chuckled a little bit, then denied it, “Oh, please, you were beautiful. I love having you in class.”

We began talking about teaching, and I was at first surprised to learn that Klett was initially a perfectionist, “extremely strict and way too tough.” Now, however, she prioritizes creating a nurturing and safe environment for everyone she teaches, which is the perfect way to describe the atmosphere of her class. “You have to create an environment where people aren’t afraid to do something that might not work out,” she says, “because sometimes when they do that, it’s what produces the most beautiful results.” Her choreography mirrors this balance between tough and relaxed. It’s not in the style of typical trick-after-trick competition routines, and it’s not quite of the experimental walking-in-a-circle-for-five-minutes type either. She describes this best as an interest in the “technique behind the movement”; she would rather have her dancers maintain their balance on one leg than whack an extension they can’t control for more than a second.

Klett has been teaching for years. After graduating from the University of Virginia in 2005, she would teach dance after she got off work during the week and on weekends. However, “as the years went by,” she says, “I realized more and more that dance really is where I belong. And I felt like it was an important part of who I am and a place where I can make an impact on other people’s lives.” Klett began her involvement with Capitol Movement, Inc. (CMI) as a dancer in their adult company, and was soon teaching and choreographing for their pre-professional group, composed of dancers ages 11-17. In the meantime, she still had her 9-5 job, so teaching dance afterwards meant Klett wouldn’t return home until past 9pm. She conveys no sense of resentment towards these long hours: “Yes, it was exhausting. But I think it’s one of the things that everyone has to go through when they know there’s something they want to do that’s not easy to come by.” She shrugs, “You do what you gotta do because you’re passionate about it.”

In this time, Klett created and legitimized CMI’s Pre-Professional Company, which is now in its seventh season. “Pre-Pro” dancers aim to build dance into their profession and have the opportunity to work with professional dancers and choreographers, whom Klett brings in. Although this program was initially the sole training ground for Pre-Pro dancers, Klett says, “Our dancers now are so hungry for accelerated training that they want to have this program on top of what they do at a studio.” This means that dancers from different studios who would normally compete against one another come together in preparation for their annual “Movement of the People” show. No Dance Moms drama here.

There’s no typical day for Klett: “Some days I feel like I’m on the phone all day. Other days I’m in front of the computer. Other days I’m at the studio teaching.” This variety keeps her engaged and mindful of what she’s doing—“I will get rusty if it’s a lot of repetition,” she says—and working with so many different people keeps her inspired to be a better leader, teacher, and mentor. After taking a few seconds to think, Klett answers that the person who inspires her most is not one person, but the dancers she teaches. “There are days I pinch myself,” she says, “and think, How did I get to work with these people?” After a great rehearsal or show—her Pre-Pro dancers recently performed at the VelocityDC Dance Festival to a standing ovation—she leaves feeling “ready to push myself to do more and to be better for others.” Alumni who have gone on to pursue careers in dance reinforce Klett’s dedication to her work. She’s currently planning for Pre-Pro alum Will Bell, whose choreography to “All I Ask” by Adele currently has 1.6 million views on Vimeo, to come teach a workshop open all dancers in the DC-area.

Teaching is so intrinsic to dance that it’s often taken for granted. A piece of choreography simply does not exist until it is taught. There’s no script, only a comically obscure transcript of choreography that only makes sense to the person who wrote it—and still this is only sometimes. Most of the time, choreography merely exists as a mental image until it’s taught to dancers who do the moves until the choreography is committed to muscle memory. This dialogue is the very foundation of dance, and for Nicole Klett, the best part of working in the dance industry.