The mirrors at DanceWorks on Beaver Avenue still carry handprints from the morning's beginner class when Sophia Martinez, 16, claims her usual spot at the barre. It's 6:45 p.m. on a Tuesday, and the studio floor—scuffed maple laid in 1987, the year the building opened as a hardware store—vibrates with the bass of a FKA twigs track. Martinez isn't alone. Seven other dancers filter in, tightening ribbons, taping ankles, marking choreography in the reflection. By 7:30, every class in the three-studio complex is full.
This is Beaverdale's dance scene in 2024: crowded, scrappy, and increasingly impossible to ignore.
From Hardware to Choreography
Marisol Vega bought DanceWorks in 2019, months before the pandemic forced her to pivot to grainy Zoom classes in her basement. She expected to lose students. Instead, something unexpected happened.
"When we reopened, they came back in waves," Vega says, pulling enrollment records from a file cabinet behind the front desk. "Forty-two students in fall 2019. Fifty-seven by 2022. Seventy-one as of September." She does the math without pausing: "Thirty-four percent growth since 2020. And that's just us."
Similar stories echo down Beaver Avenue. Rhythm & Soul Tap Studio, operating out of a converted laundromat three blocks east, added two evening classes this year after its waiting list hit twenty names. The Beaverdale Community Center, which hosts free weekly hip-hop sessions for teens, expanded into a second gymnasium in January. Something is shifting in this northwest Des Moines neighborhood of 4,200 residents—and the people on its stages are starting to draw notice beyond city limits.
Three Dancers, Three Paths
Sophia Martinez — Contemporary
Martinez started at Beaverdale Dance Collective at age seven, hiding in the wings during her older sister's annual recital. "I remember the lights," she says. "How hot they felt from ten feet back. I wanted that."
She got it. Last March, Martinez performed a seven-minute solo, Spring Shards, at DanceWorks' semiannual showcase. An afternoon thunderstorm had flooded the parking lot and seeped through the old loading-dock door, leaving the stage floor damp and hazardous. She performed anyway, barefoot, slipping deliberately into certain slides that read as choreographed even though they weren't. The audience stood. Weeks later, she received a full scholarship to the Iowa Contemporary Dance Festival, making her the first Beaverdale dancer selected in the event's twelve-year history.
"She makes you forget you're watching technique," says Emma Thompson, her primary instructor and a former Nederlands Dans Theater member who relocated to Des Moines in 2016. "Last month I had a student who'd never performed before cry after nailing her solo. That's Beaverdale right there—terrified until they're not. Sophia was that kid once. Now she's the example."
Liam O'Connor — Ballet to Hip-Hop
At 19, O'Connor is the oldest of the three. He trained in classical ballet for eleven years, first at the Des Moines Ballet Academy and then, briefly, with a pre-professional program in Kansas City. A torn Achilles tendon at 16 ended any realistic shot at a ballet career. He returned to Beaverdale in 2022, defeated, and wandered into a community hip-hop class at the Beaverdale Community Center looking for "something that didn't require pointing my feet."
What he found was a new language. O'Connor's style now fuses ballet's vertical precision with hip-hop's grounded attack—an unusual combination that has attracted attention from regional choreographers. In August, he was invited to perform at the Midwest Movement Festival in Minneapolis, the first Beaverdale dancer to appear on that roster. He funded the trip through a part-time job at the Hy-Vee on Franklin Avenue and a GoFundMe that hit its $800 goal in four days.
"I still take ballet class twice a week," he says, stretching on the same community center floor where he started. "But I'm not trying to be a ballet dancer who does hip-hop. I'm trying to be something that doesn't have a name yet. That's harder and more interesting."
Ava Nguyen — Tap
Nguyen, 14, is the busiest. In addition to her training at Rhythm & Soul, she competes in regional tap competitions, maintains a YouTube channel with 12,400 subscribers, and teaches a beginner class for seven- and eight-year-olds on Saturday mornings. Her channel started as a pandemic project—tutorial videos filmed in her parents' garage—but gained traction when her breakdown of a 2023 Jason Samuels Smith routine went viral among tap students.
"She has this thing where her rhythm patterns sound like conversation," says Derek Holloway
