Austin: Meet Your New Teacher Camille Wiltz
Camille crackles with energy: chat with this movement babe for ten minutes and you’ll be aloft in clouds of excitement, leaping from one idea to the next with the same raucous energy of a Dance Church class. Austin, TX, get ready to really launch back into Dance Church with Camille Wiltz (she/her). If you took a DC x Austin class with Valeria (we love and miss!) when she was guiding, you’ve likely danced with Camille. She fell in love with Dance Church last year, and now she’s ready to lead the charge and reactivate the Austin DC scene. A self-described terrible speller who also loves word games, Camille is always ready for a challenge, for a new sensation, and for playfulness.
🍉 Okay, so you found Dance Church in Austin with Valeria. What lit you up about classes when you first started going as a taker?
Camille: I’m not sure I am able to access joy as quickly as you do in a DC class. I’ve been dreaming up Austin DC since I first discovered DC Go during COVID. As a professional artist, seeking professional opportunity during lockdown, I found freedom in remembering I can dance for fun. I grounded myself in the joy movement brings. So when Valeria told me it was coming to Austin, I was ecstatic. It was the missing piece! I brought as many of my friends as I could. They had to get a taste of my medicine, and sure enough we were all sweating with massive smiles slapped across our faces.
🍉 And now you’re re-launching classes in your city!
Camille: I am so excited to re-launch Austin DC! The city is hungry for it! The people here regularly push back darkness even when their ideas and passions are overlooked and abandoned. I want to dance with these spirits. I want to invite these souls into a home where they can activate the dreamer inside them. I value a brave space where we can all take a risk together because no space is truly safe. I want their imaginations to run wild and their insecurities to slip off their skin because they deserve to feel free in their body.
🍉 Inclusion and dreaming are gorgeous goals for your class community, Camille. Tell us more about your dreams for the future of Dance Church Austin.
Camille:
I want the community to be what we are and dance to be what we happen to do. The relationship I have cultivated with myself and with others is deeply rooted in my commitment to honesty. I have found that my transparency and vulnerability create spaces for people to confidently share exactly who they are. We can mindfully contribute to the space with our whole spirit, we intentionally listen beyond our ears and into our bodies, we make space and take space, and what is said in our space stays, and what is learned leaves. The common denominator of a shared movement language takes our work across the finish line. When we can access our honesty with language, we uphold accountability, align with each other's values, and challenge one another to be sensational. This cultivation of self-awareness makes for an incredibly collaborative space.
🍉 You have such a beautiful, poetic lens for community and practice. Outside of Dance Church, where do you find a home in the professional dance scene in Austin?
Camille: I am regularly grateful for my time with Ty Graynor in TY&CO. I also dance and teach with Souldescape (just got back from a sweet summer mentoring moment with this company). And I’m also beyond excited to launch Allysen Hooks Projects this fall!
🍉 Sounds like you’re saturated in performance. We hope you’ll keep us updated about your shows as they happen! Of course we love that all the Dance Church teachers are professional movement artists and performers. But we also consider teaching to be an art in and of itself. What do you love about teaching?
Camille: What I love about teaching are the moments when my peers/students realize that they already hold everything that they need inside of them. They realize they can get curious about their own learning. I get to facilitate and offer what I have learned from my own love affair with dance.
I imagine my Dance Church classes will feel like we can release our inhibition, an outpouring of pleasure and desire, mixed with massive smiles and sweat. It will feel like watching the best movie you have ever seen for the first time, hearing that song for the first time, visiting your long-distance friend, finishing a good book, or eating a warm, homemade cookie, but it will be us and our bodies, moving and discovering more together.
🍉 Haha, you’re giving us full-on fantasy here. I can smell the cookies and hear the pages turning in that crisp hardcover! But let’s get pragmatic for a second: tell us your perfect in-class or post-class community ritual.
Camille: I cannot wait to bounce our bones and return to our breath over and over again. We can jump into Barton Springs Pool or grab a coffee afterward.
🍉 A sweat and a swim sounds dreamy indeed. What kind of music can we expect to move to, in your class?
Camille:
Rhyme Dust - MK, Dom Dolla
🍉 When is your first class?
Camille: Saturday September 14th! Stay tuned: registration drops on August 28th 😉❣️