Making it in The Big Apple: every artist’s dream. Mrs. Shelby Kelly, who teaches dance and coaches the SunDancers, achieved the unattainable, taking on not only New York City, but spreading her reach to Hong Kong and Sydney to touch lives with dance.

Mrs. Kelly had humble beginnings from when she was just three years old.

“I really did love it from the time that I was little,” Mrs. Kelly said. “I think there was one year in elementary school when I stopped dancing to try to play sports, and that was a miserable failure — my parents said that I danced across the basketball court, so I immediately went back the next year and never stopped.”

After dancing through high school, Mrs. Kelly attended UT Austin, then transferred to Abilene Christian University to pursue a degree in dance education.

“Partway through my time in college I decided that I really wanted to teach, I didn’t just want to perform. I really wanted to finish whatever degree I was going to need for the future in those four years, and so I transfered, because at the time UT did not have a degree in dance and teaching; it didn’t exist — it exists now, which is fantastic — so I transferred to Abilene Christian,” Mrs. Kelly said. “They have an interdisciplinary degree, where you can create your own degree. I worked with them and the state and did my education portion of school there and graduated with a dance education degree — and I was able to finish on time, which for me was huge. Then I immediately moved after school to New York to dance.”

Though she didn’t know if the move would work out, Mrs. Kelly knew New York was where she was supposed to be.

“I didn’t have a job, I only knew one person — I just knew that I needed to go. I felt really strongly about it, and it had been a lifelong dream of mine, so I just decided that I would go. I signed a six month lease and thought, ‘If I love it, great, I’ll stay — if I hate it, it’s six months of my life, I’ll know and then I’ll come home’,” Mrs. Kelly said. “Austin will always be here, there will always be a job for a teacher, so I knew that I could teach at any point, but I felt like I needed to go ahead and move, and perform while I was young and had the moxy to be able to do it, and while my body was ready for it.”

Mrs. Kelly’s leap of faith paid off, and she landed a job within her first two weeks.

“I just started auditioning for anything and everything that I possibly could, whether or not I fit the bill — I was like, ‘I don’t care, I’m going to go!’, because the more you put yourself out there the mor e likely you are to get hired, and you just never know the connections that you’re going to make,” Mrs. Kelly said. “I just kind of went at it with a ‘I’m going to do as much as I can’ attitude, and within the first two weeks I got a job with a company called FEAR.less Dance and ended up dancing with them my entire time in New York.”

One of the best experiences Mrs. Kelly had was working with Project Dance. 

“It’s an organization that tours around the world and puts on these weekend dance events. They go and teach classes, but the main crux of the event is an outdoor performance on Saturday, where different student groups or even professional companies will submit their work to see if it can be in the show, and if it’s approved they get to come and perform,” Mrs. Kelly said. “The shows are literally in the hearts of major cities around the world — our event in New York is in Times Square: we put up a stage and bring dancers in and put on a show. The cool thing about this organization is it’s not just about art — which is hugely important, that alone would be enough — but it’s about dancing with integrity and dancing to inspire hope and healing.”

The project was created in 2011 after the terror New York faced and has spread to inspire hope all around the globe.

“It was birthed after the events of 9/11 by a Rockette, Cheryl Cutlip, who was living in New York at the time. She saw all the pain and grief that the city was going through, and felt really moved that art could be a powerful conduit for conveying hope and healing, so she birthed the show out of that,” Mrs. Kelly said. “It was such an incredible thing — it started happening that people were approaching her saying, ‘I want to do this in LA, Toronto, Sydney, Hong Kong’. I got to work really closely with Cheryl and travel the world with her and teach at the events, then I also got to perform, which was probably my favorite thing that I did while I lived in New York, because I literally danced around the world. It was a huge, huge blessing and a huge life experience.”

The capability that dance has to bring people together is something that Mrs. Kelly is very passionate about.

“When you dance with a message and a purpose beyond just the movement itself, it’s powerful. Art is so powerful because you don’t have to speak the language of the people; you can watch it and see what the message and the story is, and that’s something I feel really strongly about and what I love about dance,” Mrs. Kelly said. “It’s more than just movement: it’s about bridging gaps between people and helping, and even broaching some of those really tough social conflicts. You can do that in the format of dance, in a w ay that is harder to do with words, I think — but I feel like dance is my first language, it’s the easiest to speak for me; I feel like a lot of dancers feel that way.”