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Belly Dancer Teaches Art Form |
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Friday, 19 June 2009 |
By ANGELA WEAVER
Staff Writer
ST. MARYS — Every Thursday evening, sounds of music and sometimes bells can be heard coming from Evolve Fitness as a group of women get together to learn belly dancing from a new face at a local organization.
Puerto Rico native Jessica Nagle teaches the two belly dancing classes through Arts Place for the summer session, her first collaboration with the organization.
“I was teaching at Troy’s Hayner Center,” Nagle said.
“They have a class catalogue and Heidi (Steinke Meade) receives it and she called me up and asked if I’d be interested in teaching here.”
Nagle grew up in Puerto Rico and moved to the United States when she was 22.
“My mother moved with my grandmother up here — she was sick,” she said, adding that she was in college in Puerto Rico at the time. “I moved and finished college in Orlando.”
Nagle said she got her start in belly dancing while in Florida.
“I’ve been dancing since I was little and I always wanted to do it,” she said.
“I saw an ad in the paper from a woman who was looking for dancers for a troupe. I auditioned and started dancing with them.”
Nagle said the troupe performed at a lot of community-type shows and eventually it broke up and Nagle became pregnant with her son Jaron, now 2.
“Three months after I had my baby, I started dancing again as a way to get back into shape,” she said, adding that she began dancing on her own.
Since she began dancing six years ago, Nagle said she has traveled around Florida — mostly in Orlando and Kissimmee — as well as around Ohio.
“It’s relaxing,” Nagle said of her dancing. “You get to move part of your body that you didn’t know you had. I love it — it’s a form of expression of myself when I don’t know how to use words, a form of self expression.”
She and her husband, Aaron, moved to Troy last September, and Nagle said she spends her time teaching at studios in Troy and Vandalia in addition to the Thursdays she teaches in St. Marys. When she’s not teaching, Nagle said she is either at home with her son or at the library with him.
“We go to the library a lot and he can stay busy there,” she said.
Nagle said she has seen differences between growing up in Puerto Rico and living in the United States.
“The food, the people,” she said. “At least in Florida, the people are in a hurry — it’s a little slower here. In Puerto Rico, everybody takes it so slow.”
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 15 July 2009 )
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