By Steve Garone
Wayland resident Andrea Blesso plays a prominent role in Arts Wayland’s dance program, currently building the internship program at Arts Wayland as a board member, and as director of internship programs.
She sees Arts Wayland as a place where her interest in using the arts for community outreach could play well. To her, it is a chance to bring dance to where people already gather
Blesso began dancing around nine. She was inspired and encouraged by her mother, a jazz dancer who owned a dance studio in East Hartford, Conn. Despite a rebellious spirit and growing up in a family of athletes, she dove into modern dance, jazz, and ballet.
Modern dance holds a special place in her heart, according to Blesso. She said, this dance type, which takes many forms, involves “adapting movement vocabulary based on what is around you.” This led her to see how dancing could be used not only to achieve community outreach but also as a technique to present current events in creative and powerful ways.
When Blesso moved to Billerica in the 1990s, she saw the town as “rough and tumbling.” She said that dance provided her with some consistency and grounding. She enrolled at the Donna Miceli Dance Center, where some wonderful high-quality teachers allowed her to try many types of dancing, she said. The studio established several dance companies that offered opportunities to participate in community performances. This reinforced her belief that dance could have a positive impact.
At Roger Williams College, she took advantage of learning from professional artists and teachers from New York, San Francisco, and other cities. This not only gave her great exposure but pushed her really hard, according to Blesso.
While in college, she auditioned for a ballet group at the Hartt School of Ballet at the University of Hartford. This experience, she said, made her realize that she had little interest in competitive dancing, but rather in “influencing the world.” Humanity rather than perfection was her new goal, she said. To her, dance was the first language of human beings, and now she fully embraced that concept.
After graduating, Blesso attended the Boston-based Bennett Dance Company, where she began to push the limitations of human movement through modern and aerial dance. Employing ropes, harnesses, stilts, and other props, and relying on the trust dancers have with each other, she said this dance pursuits required a personality that was both fearless and curious. Knowledge of human anatomy was also needed as she and other dancers pushed their limits in an optimistic, knowledgeable, but intelligent way, she added.
A stint at the Snappy Dance Theatre, a Boston-based touring company, followed. It was there that Blesso became a salaried dancer. She toured mostly around New England, but also in Nashville and other U.S. venues.
Teaching at the Miceli Dance Center as a guest artist, she worked with Partners for Youth with Disabilities through a program called Access to Theatre. She worked with both abled and disabled teenagers in the areas of visual arts, music, and dance.
Blesso said she used this program to “shift the lens” for participants, encouraging them to dance to express their feelings and to include their reactions to current events. It was a chance to use dance as a “tool for advocacy.”
Blesso worked part-time in 2009 at the Boston Center for the Arts (BCA). She used this opportunity to learn more about project management, data analysis, and marketing communications and started dance programs at the BCA, which served as a launchpad for artists in a variety of disciplines. She said, everything came together at the BCA —the human body as a vehicle for dance and for change; how to write and articulate ideas convincingly; and how to build trust with people.
Her lighting and dance floors’ technical skills evolved. She raised the money in 2023 to build a permanent dance studio at the BCA. As director of Dance and Interdisciplinary Arts at the BCA, she mentors up to 10artists or artist collectives every year, among other responsibilities.
To learn more about Blesso, visit www.andreablesso.com.
