SOMERSET, Ohio — On a Thursday evening in a village of 1,400 people, scattered among cornfields and low ridges 70 miles southeast of Columbus, twelve dancers fill a converted warehouse floor from wall to wall. Their breath cuts through the bass pouring from the speakers. Maya Thompson, a former dancer with the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, weaves between them, sometimes demonstrating a spiral descent, sometimes stopping to adjust a shoulder blade or the angle of a wrist.
Since Thompson opened the Somerset Contemporary Dance Center in 2019, this rural outpost has drawn students from Cleveland, Cincinnati, and points in between for classes that mix ballet, modern, and street dance into something harder to categorize.
From Company Dancer to Small-Town Founder
Thompson, 38, spent eight seasons with Dayton Contemporary before a knee injury ended her performing career. She moved to Somerset in 2017 with her partner, whose family owns farmland nearby, and spent two years converting a former feed-supply warehouse into two studios with 16-foot ceilings and sprung floors.
"I didn't plan to build a dance school in a town without a traffic light," Thompson said. "But I kept meeting people in Columbus and Zanesville who said they were driving an hour or more for any serious contemporary training. There was this gap between the big cities."
The center now enrolls roughly 85 students per session, ranging from teenagers to professionals in their thirties. About 40 percent travel from outside Perry County, according to Thompson's estimates. Tuition runs $18 for a drop-in class or $140 for an eight-week session.
What Happens in Class
At 6 p.m. on a recent Thursday, the advanced class begins not with stretching but with writing. Thompson asks each dancer to spend three minutes describing a conversation they wish they could have. Then she pairs them, instructing one to read while the other improvises movement in response.
"Contemporary dance can get very internal, very solipsistic," Thompson said. "I want people to stay in relationship—with text, with music, with each other."
The technique that follows borrows from ballet's vertical alignment, modern dance's floor work, and the rhythmic attack of hip-hop. Thompson calls the blend "midwestern contemporary," a label she uses partly in earnest, partly as provocation.
"I grew up in Toledo," she said. "We didn't have coastal training. We had teachers who made us watch West Side Story and Pina Bausch on the same afternoon, then figure out what connected them. That's still how I think."
Technology on the Margins, Not the Center
In 2022, Thompson partnered with Ohio University's School of Media Arts and Studies to install motion-capture sensors and two VR headsets in Studio B. The equipment, funded by a $12,000 state arts grant, allows dancers to rehearse inside a virtual proscenium, adjusting to sightlines and stage depth before performing in physical theaters.
"It's useful for maybe ten percent of what we do," Thompson said. "The rest is still bodies, sweat, failure, trying again. I worry about dance writers who hear 'VR' and think we've become a tech lab. We're not."
Graduate students from OU visit monthly to maintain the system and collect data on how dancers adjust their spacing in virtual environments. The partnership has no set end date.
The Students
Jordan Reeves, 24, drives fifty minutes from Columbus three nights a week. She started dancing at age four, stopped during college, and found Thompson's center through an Instagram post in 2021.
"I've been in classes where the teacher doesn't know your name," Reeves said during a break, tying her hair back. "Here, Maya will stop the whole room if she sees you figure something out. She wants everyone to witness it."
At the other end of experience, Marcus Chen, 16, takes the beginner class on Saturdays. His family moved to Somerset from Columbus last year. He had never danced before walking into the center on an open studio night.
"I thought contemporary meant, like, interpretive waving your arms," Chen said. "Now I can't explain what it is. I just know I think about my body differently. I notice how people walk, how they stand when they're tired."
Showcases and Open Studios
The center hosts four showcase performances per year in a black-box space that seats 80. Admission is pay-what-you-can. The most recent showcase, in March, sold out both nights. Open studio nights, held monthly, allow anyone to watch classes in progress and speak with dancers afterward.
"We don't have the funding or the reputation to tour," Thompson said. "So our audience is our neighbors. That changes how you make work. You can't pretend you're performing for some abstract critic in New York."
Context and Competition
Somerset is not the only contemporary dance training ground in Ohio.
