Mrs. Kelly, who teaches dance and SunDancers, had the experience of a lifetime: living in New York City as a professional dancer and travelling the world with Project Dance. However, there were big changes in store for Mrs. Kelly when she got back to her roots at Westwood and the SunDancers.

After three years in New York, Mrs. Kelly began a new chapter of her life.

“I got engaged to my high school sweetheart while I was living in New York, and he was in medical school in San Antonio. We were very in love and very ready to be married, so we got engaged, I stayed for a little while longer [in New York] to finish out my commitments, and then I moved to San Antonio and we got married, which was really fun and exciting,” Mrs. Kelly said. “We weren’t in San Antonio for very long, only a few months, and then I got a job teaching here in Austin and we moved back, and have been here ever since!”

When she completed a job substituting for another dance teacher at Westlake High School, Mrs. Kelly was hired to the Westwood dance department.

“I went to Westwood, I’m a Westwood alum, so it is very very near and dear to my heart. It’s home, and I had such a positive experience in the dance department when I was growing up here: I was a SunDancer, I was in the dance program, I took dance classes — honestly, it’s why I got up out of bed everyday. It was why I wanted to come to school — I felt like academically I struggled in school, and so dance was something that I felt was my safe place, my reason to come to school, honestly. It gave me confidence, it taught me morals, character building, how to be a team player and put others before myself; I just learned so much. My best friends to this day are from SunDancers!” Mrs. Kelly said. “Westwood is a special community, and I feel strongly about our dance department and SunDancers — they are a special family, and so it made complete sense for me to come back. It gave so much to me, I wanted to be able to do that for other kids, and to be apart of contributing that experience to them. I feel very blessed and very thankful that I get to be here — this is a really good job, and these jobs don’t come along all that often, so the timing of it and how it all worked out, I really do feel it was God’s timing and I do think that I was meant to be here, and I am so thankful because I love it.”

Mrs. Kelly teaches several classes in the dance department, and serves as one of the coaches to the SunDancers.

“I teach Ballet III/IV, Tap I-IV, Jazz IV, SunDancer Babies — which is our new SunDancers, we call them babies, it’s an old tradition that has just stuck — and Drill Prep in the fall, then I teach SunDancers,” Mrs. Kelly said. “It’s really fun, because I get to meet a lot of different kids, and I love all genres of dance, so I get to do a little bit of everything.”

The history behind Texas drill teams is a unique one:

“Drill teams are a Texas thing, for the most part — an anomaly, a little Texas anomaly. Drill team started at Kilgore College in East Texas, a teeny teeny tiny community college, with Gussie Nell Davis: she started it because during the football games, people were going under the stands and getting into fights during half time, and so one of the higher ups within the school said to her, ‘We’ve got to keep people in the stands during half time, can you come up with something — can you create something that’s just going to keep people in the stands?’,” Mrs. Kelly said. “And so she started drill team and precision dance. It’s very precise, precision based, and you’ll see reflections of the military within drill team — our leaders are called Officers, things like that, so there’s still a lot of that stuck with drill team.”

However, the SunDancers aren’t just about sequins and cowboy hats. What began as a football halftime show has developed into something much more.

“The coolest part about drill team to me is how it’s morphed and changed over the years: it started as something just for football season, and now I don’t think of SunDancers as a drill team, I think of them as a dance team — because they are artists, and yes, can we put on our hats and boots and high kick during half time? Absolutely! But that is not what these girls are about,” Mrs. Kelly said. “They are about artistry, about movement and integrity; they are so incredibly talented. Drill team is a fun part of the SunDancer organization, but I don’t think it’s our identity at all: they are dancers, and we are training young artists. I try to treat it like a pre-professional organization, so that if they want to go on and dance professionally, they have the skills to be able to do that. I mean, that is always my goal.”

When Mrs. Kelly was a SunDancer, her director was Mrs. Valk, who is still teaches in the dance department to this day.

“I credit Mrs. Valk greatly for the program that she built, that she was so loyal to it and so dedicated to it for so long. She set it up so well, so it’s really easy for me to walk into it, because she had done it so well — and I was a product of her, I knew her ways,” Mrs. Kelly said. “I really loved and admired her, so it was a seamless transition: I just got to walk right in and keep doing what she was doing, or at least try to — try to fill her giant shoes, which was impossible, but it’s worked out.”

The emphasis on family and community in the SunDancer program are what make it really stand out from the crowd.

“They need to feel like it’s a family, and they’re here to support the community at large. It’s not just about the surface — which is the majority of what I think our audiences at football games see, a very one dimensional group. These girls do so much, even outside of dance — I mean, our whole show this year, it’s called Be The Good and it’s about realizing how much we have in our own lives and all the good things we have in our lives, and how much we have to be thankful for, so that we can really serve and love our community from an honest place, not a place of ‘Oh, I need to do community service’, begrudgingly,” Mrs. Kelly said. “These girls have that heart, they really love, and love well. They picked some community organizations, charities that they felt like were doing really great things for people who needed help, and we’re going to highlight those charities in our dances this year and in our program, and try to encourage the audience to get involved in volunteering as well, because that’s what these girls do; I mean, they’re just awesome girls.”

As for other performers who have a passion for teaching, Mrs. Kelly encourages everyone to go out and live their dreams.

“As far as the arts and dancing goes, I am so thankful that I got to have the professional experiences that I got to have performing, because I do feel that it makes me a better teacher. I think that I was afraid initially, moving, that I was putting off my teaching career and wasn’t going to be as good a teacher — but I ended up feeling like it made me a better teacher and a stronger teacher, so to artists in the school: If you want to have those performance or real life experiences, but you also love to teach and they think that you might want to teach on down the road, go for it. Go for your experiences, and at least try and see what happens, because the cool thing about teaching is that we need teachers — and thank goodness Texas is supportive of the arts! It’s one of my missions to do all I can to advocate for the arts so that never changes — but I feel like those professional experiences defined me as a teacher, and have made me a stronger teacher. That’s something I always encourage my students: if they’re like, ‘I think I want to dance professionally’, I’m like, ‘Try it! At least go audition. If it doesn’t go anywhere, if you hate it, make a change — have a plan, in case it doesn’t work out, but always go for it because you just never know what’s going to come from it’,” Mrs. Kelly said. “Travelling is so important, having varied experiences from what you already know, getting out of your comfort zone — it just makes you understand the world a little bit better, and I think that you can bring that broader perspective into the classroom. I am really thankful that I got to have those experiences and I hope that for all our future teachers out there, that they’ll have really big life experiences so that they can be even richer teachers.”

Find Part I here.