A Major Step for Peabody's BFA in Dance

How do you tell a story with no words? That was a pressing question for Elizabeth Chaillé, Peab ’22, during one of her critical dance studies classes at the Peabody Conservatory. The assignment was to share an important memory through dance.

“It required revisiting a memory and thinking back to a trauma I had,” Chaillé says. “I realized that dance could express the past in a way that I previously couldn’t. When I was able to let go of those heavy feelings through that project, I saw how powerful dance is.”

Chaillé recalls this assignment as one of the many experiences that shaped her time as an undergraduate dance student. In fact, she was one of Peabody’s first.

She was one of the thirteen students enrolled in Peabody Conservatory’s BFA Dance program when it launched in 2018. Its goal was — and still is — to push the boundaries of dance, according to danah bella, the founding department head and inaugural Sandra Levi Distinguished Chair of Dance.

“It wasn’t just about training dancers,” she says. “It was also about educating dance artists in how they can teach, become advocates for their community, and be makers of dance.”

Since its launch, the program has grown to more than thirty students and established a uniquely interdisciplinary curriculum that integrates dance, science, music, medicine, and history. The program offers classes in multiple dance genres; a pre-professional student dance company; national and international performance opportunities; guest artist residencies; and a renowned dance faculty.

The program also builds upon the legacy of Peabody Preparatory, which has offered non-degree dance training for students of all levels, ages three through adult, for more than one hundred years.

Beyond its historic foundation, what differentiates the BFA program is its incorporation of dance science — an emerging academic field that blends the art of dance with scientific principles, bella says.

“Instead of thinking about just moving the arm to the side, we’re teaching students how to engage the appropriate joints and muscles to make the move more efficient and less prone to injury,” she says. “I could visually see the improvement in dancers when they started to do this work.”

Since 2018, bella and her faculty have expanded this program, now offering more dance science courses, such as advanced kinesiology and body conditioning. Advancements like these are part of what led Peabody to install bella as the Sandra Levi Distinguished Chair of Dance in 2025, the department’s first endowed position.

“Peabody’s growth over the last decade has been remarkable. The Dance program—under danah bella’s leadership—has been instrumental in growing the program,” says Sandra Levi Gerstung, who took dance classes at Peabody Preparatory as a young child and later majored in modern dance in college.

“It was important to me to help ensure the continued growth of the Dance program at Peabody with this endowed gift,” she says.

According to bella, the endowment provides steady funding to sustain the program, as well as hire guest artists, expand dance science offerings, and explore adding other specialized classes.

“Having an endowed professorship for such a new program is rare,” bella says. “Sandra’s gift validates our work and gives us a credible distinction that will help open doors for us.”

Having joined the department’s administrative staff in 2022, Chaillé says she enjoys seeing the growth firsthand and that her time studying here has prepared her to teach and co-run a contemporary dance company of her own in the evolving field.

“The BFA program is at the forefront of dance, which is exactly what danah’s mission is,” she says.