Teaching Faculty
Last updated on May 27, 2011
Teaching Faculty
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Richard Powers
is one of the world's foremost experts in American social dance.
He has been researching and teaching social dance for thirty years and
is currently a full-time instructor at Stanford's Dance
Division. Selected by the Centennial Issue of Stanford
Magazine as one of Stanford University's most notable graduates
of its first century, he was also awarded the Lloyd Dinkelspiel Award
for exceptional contributions to education at Stanford. In
addition to his Stanford responsibilities, Richard is busy teaching
workshops across the country, in Europe, and is a popular teacher in
Japan where he has returned twenty times to teach workshops.
Richard's home page is
here.
Angela Amarillas was Stanford
University's first Dance Minor and has assisted Richard in his classes
and workshops for the past seventeen years. Angela is a graceful
dancer who shares Richard's passion for historical and vernacular
social dance. Richard and Angela have taught and performed in
Paris, Rome, Prague, Venice, Provence, London and St. Petersburg as
well as across the U.S. and Canada.
Ari Levitt, M.D. is an award-winning
teacher, dancer, choreographer, and performer well-known for
his beautiful innovative steps and flowing combinations, for his love
of close-connection partnering, and for his fun, humorous, energetic,
and insightful classes over a wide range of topics and styles. His
creative "Heinz-42" approach to dance (mixing it all up!), has also
made him one of this country's leading innovators in the world of
"fusion" waltz, an exciting new genre of dance which blends elements
of swing, salsa, tango, blues, and balboa into the beautiful, flowing,
traveling waltz form that we all know and love today.
Ari began his dance career in the mid-1980s, just up the road as a Stanford University undergrad, performing international folkdances with the Dunai Dance ensemble, choreographing the waltz and quadrille numbers for Stanford's annual Viennese Ball, and helping to create Stanford's first student ballroom & swing dance club. Over the next 25 years, as an adjunct to his work as a physician and dance instructor in his home town of Seattle, Ari has continued to teach and perform throughout the USA, Canada, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North & South Pacific. He currently runs two wonderful international dance camps, "Waltz week in Vienna" and "New Zealand Dance Adventure" open to dancers from the USA and around the world. Check them out for 2012! (The sites currently show 2011 programs, but will be updated soon for 2012)
Ari's Seattle website can be found here.
Joan Walton
has taught classes in Ragtime Era, Jazz Age and 19th Century dance at
Vintage Dance workshops across America, in Europe and Australia. She
has created award-winning choreography for opera and musical theatre,
and has performed as a guest artist with the Cincinnati Pops
Orchestra, dancing Morton Gould's challenging Tap Dance Concerto. As
Assistant Director and dancer with Richard Powers' Flying Cloud
Vintage Dance Troupe for ten years, she performed all over the
country, including at the Smithsonian and in the ABC-TV mini-series
North and South. Her energy, focused teaching, theatrical
choreographic style and morning warmups have become well known to
vintage dancers over the years. As a teacher, her strength lies in
her ability to communicate movement concepts to all levels of learners
with energy, humor and interest. A keen observer of learning styles,
Joan has an ongoing interest in understanding the many ways that
people learn to dance. She received her Masters Degree in Dance
Education from Stanford University and is now teaching and
choreographing in the San Francisco Bay Area. 
Campbell Miller first fell in love
with social dance at Stanford, where she performed in several vintage
dance groups, partnered Richard Powers' classes, and earned the Louis
Sudler Prize in the Arts, the Dance Division's highest arts award.
Today she feels lucky to have found her dream job -- teaching social
dance on the faculty at the University of Texas in Austin and
traveling the world to share her passion for dance. At home, Campbell
is working to energize the Austin dance community with new ideas and
bring together dancers with different backgrounds. In her travels,
she focuses on Blues dancing and Fusion -- how to combine elements
from styles like Blues, Tango, Waltz, and Swing to be able to dance to
a wide variety of music. Her classes strike a unique balance between
technique and play, giving students just enough detail to challenge
themselves but also plenty of confidence to be creative on the dance
floor. Her talent, warmth, and pure joy for teaching and dancing
create a memorable learning experience that has students coming back
for more!