The fire is lit.The fire is lit and the curtain is drawn. Prancing coltishly onto the stage are young girls, grinning broadly, nervous-kneed in leotards and tutus. The bright florescent lights of the auditorium scrutinize every pirouette, every tap, every tumbling pass, every stunt, as somewhere out in the darkened haze, proud parents fidget anxiously in their seats. For these girls, this the biggest night of their lives. For Marilyn Sanders, this is her life.Marilyn Sanders Performing Arts Studio (MSPAC) has been cartwheeling through five decades, and for the last forty years, Marilyn has given young girls the gift of dance. She’s watched them grow into confident women who become mothers, dentists, businesswomen, and teachers. But more than that, she has lit a fire within, a fire to perform and shine under lights, shine in life.Thousands of eager girls have come underneath her tutelage, and thousands have left all the better for it. In this neck of the woods, it would be almost a rarity for a young girl not to be impacted by Marilyn to some degree. Most leave changed forever. Some never leave.Marilyn started dancing at a very young age. “I took dancing from the time I was six,” Marilyn says, “out of my local hometown studio in Enterprise, Alabama. My dumpy little dance teacher probably didn’t teach me a whole lot of technique, but to love to dance.”Marilyn continued dancing all the way through high school, and did a bit of student teaching at a local studio. While Enterprise was certainly— well, enterprising— the moment she visited a New York City ballet was when she learned she had a long way to go.“I had my eyes opened when I was eighteen,” says Marilyn. “My friend Jennifer and I went to New York City to take lessons, study, and train. We went in to this ballet and we thought we were hot stuff. It was in Carnegie Hall. These were semi-professionals. They were speaking in Russian and Czech. We walked in like two dumb hicks.”Marilyn became a serious dance student, studying in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. She eventually got married and settled into a small town in Mississippi, and her dream to open up her own studio was almost never realized. “I was teaching second grade in Lumberton, Mississippi,” says Marilyn. “I taught for three years. But the classroom wasn’t for me. I needed more control. I wanted to do things my way. I wanted to have artistic freedom. The freedom to make choices.”So Marilyn began to send out feelers on different communities, smaller communities sans studio. A little blip in the foothills of the Appalachians came on her radar, and she became intrigued.“We chose Jasper,” Marilyn says.Even though the couple knew not a soul from there, Marilyn says that it just “felt right.”The first studio was built downtown on Main Street (19th Street), next to Ivey’s clothing store. “We rented it,” says Marilyn. “We put up mirrors, bars, and mats. We wanted to build it as a studio because that set us apart with the community. We wanted to show that we were here to stay, that it wasn’t just an afternoon pastime. I think it made people serious about looking at me.”Marilyn stayed in the studio for three years before building a new studio. By 1984, the studio was throbbing with so many students that waiting lists emerged. At one point, she had over 500 students walking through her doors. “This was back when Mary Lou Retton was in the Olympics and women’s gymnastics was booming,” Marilyn says. “People figured out pretty quickly that it’s much harder than it looks.”She eventually hired a professional gymnastics coach for the girls’ team, Marti Hobbs, and one over the guys’ team, Jimmy Dutton.“They were a force,” Marilyn says.Every year, the girls and boys at MSPAC would put on a dance recital to a packed house. The recital itself was a culmination of hours of hard work, frustration, getting it wrong and then finally right, and doing it all over again until performance night became a mechanical facsimile of what they rehearsed for weeks. Overlong practices and seemingly endless nights were commonplace, but the finished product was always second to none.In addition to recitals, in the summers Marilyn took several students to California to get a sense of what top level dancing was all about. “I loved dancing in classes in L.A. For two weeks in the summer, we took our advanced dancers to classes professional dancers take, like on MTV. Some of the top choreographers were there. It was great for these girls to be able to come from their small hometown of Jasper and fit right in. And the confidence they learned from this—that they can tackle the world, tackle anything.”Several years ago, Marilyn moved from Jasper and allowed a qualified staff to run the center while she supervised from afar. But over the last few years, Marilyn decided that it was time for MSPAC to have a new owner. So last summer, Marilyn handed the torch to one of her former students, Christy Hand-Barger.MSPAC will continue to offer recreational dance and tumbling. In the dance building, Christy Barger teaches jazz, tap, ballet, and tiny tots classes. William Michael Cooper leads the fine arts ballet program and LeAnne Atkinson teaches clogging. In the gym, Kyle Dutton teaches tumbling, along with Misty Langston, Brooke Sawyer, and Barger. Danielle Cohoon coaches the cheer program. Kem Muncher serves as the office manager and Loretta Dutton is the studio’s bookkeeper and everything in between (and has been for the past 30 years).“I couldn’t have lasted forty years unless I was surrounded with people that can do things better than I can do,” Marilyn says. “Everybody has done their job extremely well. They have all been dedicated and very professional. It is time for me to step back and let the young professionals do what they can do. I have an elderly mother who needs my care. I have three grandsons who take up a lot of time. It’s time to move on to a different chapter of my life. It’s time to pass the torch.”Kyle Dutton, one of the students impacted by Marilyn, is one of those who has never left. “For so long, she was the biggest impact on her students’ lives, including me,” says Dutton. “I started when I was five. When I was old enough to help teach, I began teaching beside her and with her. That has evolved into a great friendship. She’s still a mentor. She’s family. That’s family.”Marilyn has specialized in the fundamentals of life, making every student feel like they matter.“There was a genuine concern for every person that walked through the door and the life they would live,” says Dutton. “That’s what she taught everyone that’s worked here. The most important thing is you knew you were cared about.”Marilyn has taught her students to tap dance through life, not to roll over when they tumble, to cheer when things are praiseworthy, when things get clogged up to keep clogging, and that life is like ballet—it is loveliest when you dance through it gracefully. 78