Page 4 - 2018 TR WWW

4SS • What Women Want • An Advertising Supplement to the Three Rivers Edition • Sunday, August 19, 2018
PHOTOS BY STACI VANDAGRIFF/ THREE RIVERS EDITION Lana Grober, owner of Lana’s Dance Studio in Lonoke, is preparing for her 40th season of dance. She began teaching dance as a teenager and has continued the career throughout her life.
LEAPS and bounds Dance instructor steps into 40th year of instruction
BY SARAH DeCLERK SPECIAL SECTIONS WRITER
On the last day of dance boot camp, the atmosphere at Lana’s Dance Studio in Lonoke is a bit hectic. After all, the young dancers —
mostly older children and preteens — have just started to learn the jazz routine they will take to competition.
Giggles echo off the mirrored walls, but when they hear the tune “Money Makes the World Go Around” from Cabaret, the kids hop to their spots and eagerly follow their instructor’s moves.
“It always cleans up the longer we go,” said Lana Grober, studio owner, who spent the summer selecting songs and choreographing dances for her students.
After 40 years of teaching, she has mastered the steps needed to take performances from concept to competition, as well as the fine art of growing shy 3-year-olds into graceful teens.
HER OWN TUNE
At 15, Grober was hardly more than a child herself when a group of parents asked her to teach their young ones to dance. Grober said her mother and father encouraged her to start her business, guiding her through paperwork and building benches for the studio.
Her biggest mentor, she added, was her dance teacher, Sally Riggs Insalaco, who provided pointers about
“You can always spot a dancer by their posture. ... They know how to carry themselves when they walk into a room, and their eye contact, lots of the time, is good because they’ve been trained to look people in the eyes and tell people their story
when they’re dancing.”
— Lana Grober,
OWNER, LANA’S DANCE STUDIO
everything from managing the studio to communicating with parents.
The studio’s first home was a room at a local day care, Lana said, adding that she taught in a room in a community building before eventually moving to her current facility. She continued to teach in Lonoke when she attended the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where she studied investments and insurance.
She began working in the field, and for six years, she split her time between her studio and her day job. Eventually, her
husband, Mike Grober, tired of the long hours and asked her to choose between the careers, she said.
“He was like, ‘Why don’t you choose the one where you feel like you’ll impact the most lives because that would be, probably, the way God would want you to go,’” she added. “I said, ‘Well, that one’s easy — the dance studio.’”
When she had children, Lana performed a balancing act familiar to many working mothers. She reduced her days at the studio and hired more instructors. She also brought her babies to class, where her mother rocked them while Lana taught.
Her sons, Zane, now a college freshman, and Gavin, a high school sophomore, both grew up taking dance lessons at the studio, she said.
Over the years, Lana swapped records for cassettes, cassettes for CDs and CDs for MP3s. Dancing changed, as well, incorporating new genres, such as pointe and lyrical, and emphasizing new skills, such as acrobatics.
“The fundamentals have stayed the same, but the trends are always changing,” she said, adding that she attends master classes in Los Angeles and New York City to stay current.
Looking back, she said that choosing to continue teaching at the studio was the right decision.
“If you have passion to do what you’re willing to do, then you’ll still love your job 40 years later,” she said. “My job is fun, and it’s not boring at all, watching all those kids grow up and teaching them to dance.”
THROUGH THE AGES
Although her studio is based in Lonoke, students travel from England, Carlisle, Brinkley, Little Rock and other