Lake Oswego Academy of Dance

I came to Roxanne’s adult class last Sept. This woman has a beautiful physique for her mature age. She is able to demonstrate and show the moves so gracefully! I haven’t missed very many classes and have greatly improved all around in my ballet practice. Center work. Across the floor.
I started as an adult 4 years ago. I can hang in there well in this intermediate class. I’ve come far in less than a year with Roxanne! Come take class if you want a workout for the body and the brain. It’s so nice to turn off thinking about everything else and get into my body and the music.

My daughter is 6. When your kid is 6 you try a bunch of stuff and see what sticks. Dancing isn’t that thing for her, which is fine. We’ll definitely be doing something else come next year. The trouble was, we figure out dancing wasn’t her thing 2 or 3 months into the school year. She never wanted to go to the lessons and there were tears. We kept going to learn «keeping our commitments», but I think we will employ the «fail fast» concept of agile development, which should work great for children’s activities in the future. In order of irritation to me: Lake Oswego Academy of Dance charges you 99 dollars for the costume very early in the year. We were locked in much earlier than we would have liked. Later I was also told that we needed to buy black jazz shoes to go with the 99 dollar costume, when all the girls have perfectly good pink jazz shoes. They are 6, they don’t need matching shoes, imho. The parking lot is far too small to accommodate the number of classes they have running during any given hour, and other close-​by businesses employ parking nazis. My daughter’s instructor seems fine with the children, but was lukewarm in her interactions with me. Now coming to the end of the year, they handed me 4 pages of instructions for the pictures, makeup, hair, fundraisers, dress rehearsals and performance. As dance is not in our future, lots of this content was an unexpected and irritating expense. Lesson learned, I should have asked about all costs and time commitments. Before taking your child here, I would suggest you do the same.

Great for toddlers and little kids. Don’t have much experience otherwise so can’t speak to the programs as they get older but I see lots of pictures and trophies for older kids and see regular grandmothers doing classes too.