New State College Area Performing Arts Academy Brings Together Gymnastics, Dance and Circus Arts

When Nittany Gymnastics closed last year after 30 years in business, Dmitry Myers and Finda Reichert found themselves at a crossroads.

Myers — a circus arts, dance and gymnastics professional — had been training at the College Township facility since he was a young child growing up in State College and was a teacher and coach at Nittany. Reichert was a gymnastics instructor at Nittany for a decade and coaches a champion USA Independent Gymnastics Club team that was based there.

Together, the good friends decided to strike out on their own, taking what they learned at Nittany Gymnastics and adding their own twist. After a year of planning, as well as some stops at temporary locations, Myers and Reichert recently opened their Phoenix Academy of Performing Arts of Pennsylvania in its new permanent home at 118 Hawbaker Industrial Drive in Patton Township.

Phoenix Academy offers instruction for children, teens and adults in gymnastics, dance and, for the first time in the region, circus arts.

“Moving on to make it our own but taking what we learned from Nittany and going on was logical, but it was also a huge leap of faith,” Reichert said. “When we all got together on the idea it all made perfect sense. For me, loving the sport of gymnastics and wanting to make it my own and for Dmitri having his background in circus and dance and gymnastics, it was the perfect opportunity. It was just a wild time in that process because it was one thing closing and one thing opening and … taking that leap of faith.”

After Nittany closed, Reichert leased space in its Commercial Boulevard facility before it was sold to continue working with her USAIGC team, then renting space from Fearless Athletics in Bellefonte. After she, Dmitry Myers and his father, Evan Myers, formed Phoenix Academy, they moved to space in the Benner Pike Shops while they renovated the former Wesco Lighting property to become their permanent home.

The former Wesco property provided an ideal location for Phoenix Academy’s offerings, Dmitry Myers said. It had high ceilings needed for circus arts, as well as the needed spaces for a main gym, a ballet studio with plenty of natural light, birthday party room, lobbies and offices. The upstairs area overlooking the main gym was perfect for the preschool program.

“We all went there and just got a really great energy from the building,” Myers said. “It had what we needed… There wasn’t a lot of real demo work we had to do.”

“It really just leant itself perfectly to all the different disciplines we were trying to offer,” Reichert added. “… For us, our location [close to North Atherton Street and Interstate 99] is great because it’s very central, so families can come from all over central Pennsylvania.”

Opening the new venture, Myers saw a prime opportunity to bring a new kind of instruction to Centre County. He was a competitive gymnast and is professionally trained in ballet, with performance experience in all forms of dance in productions around the country. He’s also a professional circus artist who studied at the National Circus School of Canada and Circus Warehouse, taught at the Philadelphia School of Circus Arts and has extensive experience in the flying trapeze.

Circus arts, he explained, is a mixture of dance, theater, gymnastics and aerial acrobatics.

“The cool thing about circus arts is that there really are no rules,” Myers said. “It’s not like if you’re in gymnastics and you have to get judged and you have to follow certain rules. You have to stay safe in the air, but it’s really about the creative mind of the artist and what they want to do and they how they feel about their work, how they feel about what they can give to an audience…. You learn the skills and then you put your own spin on things. Every artist is different and artists may do very similar skills but the way they perform their skills puts a trademark on the artist because we’re all so individual and creative.”

Myers has been performing circus arts for 10 years and said people often asked him if there was somewhere to go for instruction locally. Until now, he had to tell them no.

Phoenix offers circus arts classes for kids and adults, including aerial apparatus, tumbling acrobatics, handstands, flexibility and alignment.

“The amount of adults that want to learn circus is amazing,” Myers said. “The thing about the circus is that it comes into town and it disappears. You set up for five, six days, maybe a week and then it packs up and goes away. How do you learn to do that? How do you get that knowledge? … Circus has never been done here, other than Ringling coming, Cirque du Soleil coming and doing a show. There have never been circus classes here.

“That’s the really cool thing about building it here is I’m starting with the aerial stuff. Eventually I would like it to be bigger and bigger, grow the program, and eventually I would like to have a circus festival here. So small steps first. Big dreams, small steps.”

For dance instruction, Phoenix wants to offer something for everyone, including both kids and adults, with ballet, jazz, and dance for fitness among the current offerings.

“We’re really trying to branch out as far as the classes go for dance,” Myers said. “I come from ballet, professionally trained Russian ballet. That’s great as a base for all dance, but not every kid wants to do ballet, especially when you incorporate them with circus because there’s so many different styles of dance within circus.”

For Reichert’s USAIGC team gymnastics, members are required to take at least an hour a week of dance classes for ballet instruction and technique.

“That way our team has another tool for them to use,” Reichert said. “Our foundation is going to be stronger because gymnastics and dance do go hand in hand with each other, the artistry and technique. We do incorporate that, but not until they’re on team.”

Phoenix also offers pre-school and recreational gymnastics classes, as well as a pre-team program for youngsters to get an introduction to competitive gymnastics.

Reichert explained that the USAIGC team is different from the USA Gymnastics Development Program (formerly called its Junior Olympics program) that you might occasionally see on television, but that it is an internationally competitive program.

“We run a different program which trains fewer hours a week and with a much more holistic approach,” Reichert said. “The girls are able to train at high levels without the initial wear and tear on their bodies and the mindset is different.”

Not all team gymnasts are expected to do the same skills and can pick which skills best fit their body types and flexibility, she said.

“Also this program, because it requires less hours of training, kids are allowed to have more of a social life,” Reichert said. “They’re allowed to engage in more school activities, more church activities, that kind of thing outside the gym. That was something that was really important to me to bring this program more to the forefront.

“It’s kind of gotten a reputation as not being a competitive program, but that really is not the case. It’s an international program. We compete against seven different countries when we have our final world championships of the year. It’s a great option to do competitive gymnastics but also other things in their lives.”

As with the team gymnastics, Reichert and Myers want all of their programs to be a “positive and strengthening” experience, she said.

“The program I run lends itself to the whole person,” Reichert said. “There’s a culture in gymnastics that is like do or die, negative, ‘no that’s wrong; do it again.’ I think there’s a better way to teach it and that’s what I’m trying to do.”

Myers added that they want students to come away from the programs feeling they have had beneficial experiences, no matter how long or at what level they continue.

“We want to have a really great toolbox for our students to use what they learn from us,” he said. “Whether or not they continue that professionally, that’s great. If they don’t then they’ve had the experience and we hope they enjoyed it. If you stop for some reason, whatever that reason may be, we want you to leave the sport feeling worth having done it. We want you to leave feeling you’ve accomplished something. We also want you to leave the art form/sport just happy that you got to do it. Good memories, great people, positive instruction. It’s all about possibility of building people up.

“We really try to stress that it’s a judgment-free zone. We want you to feel included, and feel important and feel worth your time here.”

For information about Phoenix Academy of Performing Arts of Pennsylvania’s classes and programs, visit phoenixacademystatecollege.com.