About Caitlin
The daughter of performers, Caitlin has been stage struck since childhood. Beginning her choreographic career at age 15, she worked as a choreographer for musical theater and pageant contestants throughout high school. In college, she discovered ballroom dance and, with her dance partner, founded the Williams College Swing Club. After some years working outside of the arts, Caitlin returned to dance in 2001 and built her most recent career as a dance instructor and company director at Penn State Altoona. Now retired, she looks forward to new challenges in the classroom, studio, and on stage.
Studio Teaching
For more than a dozen years, Caitlin taught studio and lecture classes at Penn State University, Altoona campus. She has created proven undergraduate syllabi in ballet, modern, and jazz technique, as well as body conditioning for dancers.
Outside academia, Caitlin has taught children, teens and adults in modern, jazz, ballet, and ballroom styles. She particularly enjoys beginning and mixed level classes.
Her interest in movement extends into the world of theater as well. She has developed and taught workshops and classes in movement for actors. These range in length from single hour-long workshops to a semester-long course for college students.
Next open workshops...
Central PA Theatre and Dance Festival
Join Caitlin Osborne and Allied Motion Dance Company for workshops in June 2022.
Choreography
In 2007, Caitlin founded the Ivyside Dance Ensemble, a student company housed at Penn State Altoona. Over the years, she created dozens of original works and trained scores of dancers.
As the company's chief administrator, Caitlin ran auditions, hired and managed guest choreographers, coordinated publicity and documents, and partnered with the theater's technical director to create fully realized productions.
Mutual respect, personal discipline, and high professional standards for behavior were the values that made Ivyside Dance a community as well as a performance group. In 2018, Caitlin left Penn State, but retains rights to all repertory she created there. Many of these works are available to be set on new groups. A list is available here.
Dance History
Favorite subject: dance history. Whether as a guest lecturer (American History, Intro to American Studies) or professor of a full-length course (Dance History), Caitlin shows her passion for bringing the past to today's dancers and audience members. Over the course of her academic career, she has prepared, edited, and refined dozens of presentations.
In all her lecture/discussions, Caitlin favors the big questions: What is art? Who gets to judge what art is meaningful and good? How do we assess dance that exists outside a western construct of art?
Caitlin is available to community groups, dance programs, and academic programs as a guest lecturer. Some topics:
Ballet history survey in three acts
African aesthetic in American stage dance
American choreographers in search of American dance
Race, religion, and moral panic and American social dance
Romanticism and the ballet
Screen capture for Interface presentation, Intro to American Studies, 2017
Allied Motion Dance Company
In 2019, longtime collaborators Caitlin Osborne and KT Huckabee relaunched Allied Motion Dance Company. Founded in 1999 by Huckabee, Allied Motion was primarily a performance company until it went on hiatus in 2008.
In its new iteration, Allied Motion focuses on community involvement and performance opportunities for dancers in the region who find it difficult to work in a traditional studio setting.
Look for upcoming programs...
The Children's Dance Theater Workshop, a free community-based creative movement workshop for upper elementary ages.
Day of Dance, a one-day festival of workshops culminating in an adjudicated concert, open to dance studios and programs in Central Pennsylvania.
Allied Motion at the Central PA Theatre and Dance Fest.
For more information, check out www.sites.psu.edu/alliedmotiondance/