By [Reporter Name]
May 10, 2024 | St. Mary's, Alaska
In the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, where the Andreafsky River meets the Yukon, the village of St. Mary's (population 562) is not the place most people would expect to find a dedicated jazz dance program. Yet for the past eight years, a former Anchorage dancer named Margaret Tikiġaq has been building something unexpected here: a small but rigorous training ground where young people from across the region learn technique, choreography, and performance skills rooted in jazz traditions.
This is not a story about state-of-the-art facilities or nationally touring companies. It is a story about scarcity, adaptation, and what happens when one instructor refuses to accept that geography determines opportunity.
The Program: Built from What Is Available
Tikiġaq, 34, arrived in St. Mary's in 2016 as a health aide through the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. She had trained at the Alaska Dance Theatre in Anchorage during her teens and had spent three years performing with a cruise-ship ensemble before returning to her mother's home region. She started teaching informal classes in the gymnasium of the St. Mary's School, using taped-down X's for spacing and a Bluetooth speaker whose battery died after ninety minutes.
Today, her program—formally called Yuuyaraq Dance Project, though students still refer to it as "Margaret's class"—serves roughly twenty students ages twelve to twenty-two, with a waitlist of younger children. Classes meet four times weekly in the school gym or, during warmer months, on the plywood stage behind the city tribal building. There is no sprung floor, no full-length mirrors, no ballet barre. Dancers warm up in boots and parkas and change into socks or secondhand jazz shoes once the propane heaters have had time to work.
"We don't have what studios in Juneau have," Tikiġaq said during a phone interview in late April. "But we also don't have the distraction of thinking there's somewhere better you should be. You're here. You work with what you have."
What They Study—and What They Make From It
The curriculum is built on classic jazz technique: isolations, pirouettes, kicks, and traveling combinations drawn from the styles of Jack Cole, Bob Fosse, and Luigi. But Tikiġaq also requires students to study Yup'ik dance, the traditional form practiced by many of their families through local dance groups. Each semester, students must choreograph a short piece that incorporates at least one element from each tradition.
"They get really strict about what counts as jazz and what counts as Yup'ik," said Elena Active, whose fourteen-year-old daughter, Selma Active, has trained with Tikiġaq for four years. "Last year Selma got in an argument with another girl because the other girl used a drumbeat that wasn't from our region. Margaret loved it. She wants them to be that specific."
The results are uneven, Tikiġaq acknowledges—some fusion pieces work better on paper than in performance—but the process has produced dancers with a distinctive vocabulary. In 2022, Selma Active and Marcus Evan, both then sixteen, attended the Pacific Northwest Regional Dance Festival in Seattle as the first dancers from St. Mary's ever to compete at a national-qualifying event. Active placed in the top fifteen for her senior jazz solo; Evan received a choreography commendation for a piece that set Fosse-style angle work against a song performed by his grandmother's dance group.
"There was this moment in Marcus's piece where he did a jazz hand and then dropped into a kneel, and the elders in our audience started calling out—they recognized the kneel from a cauyaq song," said Thomas Evan, Marcus's uncle and the manager of the Yupiit Piciryarait Cultural Center in Bethel. "I don't know if the Seattle judges understood what happened. But we did."
The Students: Where They Go, and Where They Stay
Not every student aims for a professional career. Some use the training to join Yup'ik dance groups with stronger technique; others teach younger children in surrounding villages during the summer. But a small number have left to pursue dance more formally.
Dora Paul, 21, spent two years with Tikiġaq before enrolling in the dance program at the University of Alaska Anchorage in 2021. She is now the first St. Mary's dancer to complete a B.F.A. in the field and has accepted a teaching position with the Alaska Arts Education Consortium, which places instructors in rural schools. Paul will return to the Yukon-Kuskokwim region this fall, splitting her time between Bethel and St. Mary's.
"I thought I had to leave to be a real dancer," Paul said. "Margaret never said
