By Treasure Brown

In the fall of 2022, Collegiate welcomed new Upper School Dance teacher Angie Muzzy. This year, Muzzy teaches Dance Performance and the Dance Company, as well as after school hip hop. I have had the pleasure of learning from her last year in the Dance Company and again this year in the Honors Dance Company. 

Muzzy was born in Warwick, a small town in Western Massachusetts that borders New Hampshire and Vermont. She attended public school and danced in the neighboring town, where she studied under teachers who had studied dance in college. When she was 14, she got the opportunity to live and dance in Cambridge, Massachusetts with one of her mentors. This allowed her to expand her experience and knowledge and get out of the “bubble that was Warwick,” which she credits to her being a dancer and teacher today. 

In 2004 she moved on to Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire. Keene State is a teaching college, and many of their students attend to pursue a teaching career. However, upon entering Keene, Muzzy was unsure if she wanted to become a teacher. She always knew she wanted to dance but wasn’t sure how to make a beneficial and fulfilling career of it. At Keene, she got to choreograph often and earned an internship where she could teach in local schools. During her time at Keene, she met another mentor, Marcia Murdock, who she said ultimately inspired her to become a dance teacher.

Muzzy in 2012, performing her self-choreographed solo, “Rapunzel’s Shoes.” Photo credit: Henrikke Boger.

After graduating in 2008, Muzzy wasn’t drawn to large cities, like New York, where many of her peers traveled to teach and follow their passion for dance: ”Dance can happen anywhere, I think people forget that.” Instead, she attended graduate school at the State University of New York (SUNY) College at Brockport in Brockport, New York, in their three-year Masters of Fine Arts program. There, she was tasked with creating both a creative and written thesis. This challenged her to think about “how to synthesize the creative process,” as well as write about it. Additionally, she got to learn from a professor, Bill Evans, who was intensely knowledgeable about teaching and how to teach modern dance. Evans even allowed her to be in his faculty choreographed dance, which wasn’t usual. She says that he chose her because “I could do things and understand concepts that my classmates couldn’t.” Despite this, she often felt like she stood out because she hadn’t been working with him or taking classes with him, like the other students he had also chosen. However, the experience helped her assess her strengths and weaknesses in dance.

Following her time at Brockport, Muzzy accepted a job as a dance teacher in Western Massachusetts at the MacDuffie School, a 6-12 grade international boarding school. Each year, the student body includes students from 25 different countries. When she started in August 2014, their dance program was very small due to recent teacher turnover, and she wanted to work to rebuild it. She offered choreography classes for juniors and seniors, an afterschool repertory group, introduced guest artists, and choreographed for two performances each year and the school’s musicals. Muzzy also lived on campus as a dorm parent, looking over and caring for students after classes ended. Simultaneously, she was a guest choreographer at Auburn University and completed a residency in California at The Wooden Floor. Her favorite part of this period of her career was getting “to teach, meet, and learn from people all around the world.”

This came to an end during the summer of 2021. Following the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions the year prior, Muzzy realized that she was experiencing “burn out” and was becoming tired of her job. She says that, as was the case for many others, COVID-19 required her to “slow down and reassess my life.” She withdrew from her position in June of that year; however, she still yearned to teach dance, while also moving away from the state she had been in. In her search for a new job, she applied and interviewed at Collegiate. 

Middle and Upper School Dance teachers Stacy Dudley (left) and Angie Muzzy (right). Photo courtesy of Collegiate School.

When asked about what she remembers from her first visit to Collegiate, Muzzy said she immediately noticed “the sense of trust and freedom on campus.” She also remembers meeting Middle School Dance teacher Stacey Dudley for the first time and her “being so open to new opportunities.” Since then, the two have developed a strong relationship. Muzzy says that it is refreshing to have a colleague and someone to lean on and talk to, stating that they are “in-step with one another.” 

Muzzy thoroughly enjoys working with and teaching Collegiate’s dancers, Grades 9 through 12. She realizes that, for many of the dancers, it was a significant transition to have a new dance teacher halfway through their dance career at Collegiate, after the departure of former dance teacher Kara Priddy. But she says that the dancers have “embraced the change” with open arms. She aims to add on to what students have already learned and teach them new ways to learn and think about dance as an art form, taking field trips to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to study transforming art into movement and the Central Virginia Youth Dance Festival to dance alongside dancers from various schools in Virginia.

Following her first year, Muzzy also decided to start and become faculty sponsor of Student Dance Organization (SDO), a club that supports Collegiate’s dance programs. She says that she wanted to develop SDO because she believes it is important to have student-led groups that allow students to advocate for what they are passionate about and get the community involved. “SDO values collaboration, students supporting one another, and advocacy and education.”

Now in her second year at Collegiate, Muzzy looks forward to expanding her impact, whether that be in class, through SDO, or just being someone students can look towards for advice and guidance.