Meet Julia Felker! She’s a dancer, choreographer, and one of Cal Lutheran’s very best dance teachers! She’s had more than 45 years of training and experience in concerts, musicals, and workshops. She teaches ballet, tap, jazz, and modern dance here at Cal Lutheran and always finds a way to teach her students to find their inner dancer and encourages them to be comfortable with themselves. By creating an environment where her students can both relax and work hard, while making time to remind her students to appreciate life, she truly is one of Cal Lutheran’s very best assets.
Her Campus Cal Lutheran: When did you fall in love with dance?
Julia Felker: When I was about two, I was dancing around the living room to Nutcracker music. So it was just something I fantasized about since I was a toddler: being a ballerina and dancing. I started asking my mom if I could take lessons, but she actually didn’t sign me up until I was 7. And then I took a class at a parks and rec center and the teacher was very complementary. I remember her telling my mom “she needs to take more lessons.” I remember hearing her tell my mom that and I was thinking “yeah mom, I want more lessons.” So my mom finally signed me up at a ballet studio and that was in San Diego.
HCCLU: What happened after your mom signed you up at the ballet studio?
JF: I started training in ballet only and then I started doing some gymnastics and then I got involved with musical theater in high school. I also started to get involved in sacred dance, liturgical dance at church. I just ended up doing a variety of kinds of dance by then. In late high school, I got introduced to modern dance. So when I went to college I trained in modern, ballet, and jazz as well as taking summer intensives. It was at those intensives where I learned most: some of them were six weeks long in the summer. They were really great for really getting into the nitty gritty of technical aspects of dance as well as learning choreography, repertory and partnering. At those intensives, we would do an hour and a half of ballet every day, an hour and a half of modern every day. We would have jazz, we would have partnering, composition and improvisation, as well as repertory and it culminated into performance. I started dancing professionally in my late teens and I started choreographing in high school. Partly because people know I danced well so they would ask me to choreograph things. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I just went with it and I just fell into it.
HCCLU: What did you choreograph?
JF: I choreographed two of the high school musicals when I was still in high school. They hired me once I graduated to continue to choreograph musicals. I’ve choreographed at least 30 musicals.
HCCLU: Were you in any dance companies?
JF: While I was doing some choreography for those musicals, I was a member of some modern dance companies like Donna Sternberg and Dancers. I was in modern dance companies for years and years and we traveled. Not like my daughter who’s traveling all around the world; I traveled within the country.
HCCLU: Do you have any regrets about pursuing dance as a career?
JF: I don’t have any regrets, one thing I was actually very good at was drawing and painting. I won some awards with that and I continued on to draw and paint in college. I didn’t want to give up dance to pursue the art in a full way and get a degree in that because I knew I couldn’t do both just because of the time commitment for both art forms. Dance is more limited because of your body; the younger you are the better chance you have of doing something with dance. You can still dance when you’re 80 or 90, but not to the same extent. I did continue doing some art throughout the years, but not at the same level as I used to, so I have lost some of my skills for that. That’s something I would like to pursue more because that is a part of me. I love drawing. I still had my children, mid-20s, that definitely shifted my dance world because I had opportunities to go to Europe, amongst other places, which I had to turn down. I never did go live in New York and pursue the dance life in New York, contrary to what a lot of my professors and teachers were encouraging me to do. So, I danced in LA based dance companies and I trained with a lot of people and places elsewhere. In a sense, if I had a double life, because I would never have given up my kids, but if I could go back in time and take the path of the hardcore dancer in New York and see what dance companies I could have gotten in if I was part of that world. My daughter ended up doing that because I knew what it takes to get there so I sent her to those places and made sure she had those opportunities. I don’t regret being a dancer, dance teacher, choreographer, at all.
HCCLU: When did you decide you wanted to start teaching dance?
JF: I started because people started asking me actually. It was the neighborhood ladies who would ask if I could teach their daughters some ballet because she knew I was trained in ballet and I did choreograph. It was more of people asking me rather than me advertising myself as a dance teacher that they should hire. I just fell into it. At my church, they asked me to choreograph for the church camps, like the camp fire songs. People just kept asking if I could do this and it became something I did.HCCLU: Do you love teaching?
JF: I do! Because I have had the opportunity of teaching as young as toddlers because of mommy and me classes; I have a wide range of age groups from as young as 3 to 80. The retreat work that I’ve done with the sacred dance, the spiritual dance, and women’s holistic retreat has also been an experience. With the women’s holistic retreat, I’ve had women of all shapes and sizes and abilities. Those were not just for dance, it was a holistic experience so we did all kinds of things. I did 25 years of that. I also did some weekend sacred dance; we would have people that could barely walk so we would only do upper body movement. What I’ve felt the most reward from is seeing the joy of people working hard, like here at Cal Lu, and making progress that I see in my students. The progress my students can make in a short amount of time and the feeling of satisfaction when you perform something and you feel good about it and the same with students who started with me when they were 3 and now they’re in their 20s or 30s and I’ve taught their kids or they went on to be professional dancers so I love seeing that. The creative process, making choreography, is fun for me. Seeing people say I have two left feet but then they finally get it, that’s a wonderful feeling. It’s a combination of how it fills me with joy, it keeps me moving, because having a career where you’re always moving helps quite a bit so you don’t have to move outside of your job, and how it keeps me engaged with people of all ages and helps me with continuing my creativity.
HCCLU: What’s a memory you have of some of the classes you’ve taught?
JF: I taught at a studio in Moorpark for over 25 years. For over 10 years, we had the dad’s dance for the shows. All the dads would come together, about 25 of them, for each show. To teach them choreography that they felt good about was really neat.
HCCLU: Is there a significant difference in mood between teaching college students and teaching children as young as 3?
JF: There is a difference because with younger children you also deal with the parents, which is good for the most part. The littlest ones definitely help keep me centered in remembering that each moment is really precious because they will be so focused on me. They look at me right into my eyes and a lot of them come with their little siblings, like little babies, and they’re even more pure. They’re really just soaking it all in. So there’s been times when I’ve had to go teach little ones and I’ve literally been balling my eyes out earlier that day, but I have to just suck it up and go. I have to let go of my emotions and really be attentive to those little precious people and it really does help remind me to pay attention to each moment. Each moment, each day is truly a gift. It’s amazing what they can learn, they’re just sponges. And I’m their ‘Miss Julia,’ some of them are just enamored. Their moms will ask if it’s ballet day, so in that sense I’ve become their whole world.
HCCLU: Is that scary?
JF: It’s not necessarily scary; it’s more eye-opening than anything. I realize how much I can influence them with something as simple as a look. Some children are extra sensitive and the moment you give them a look, some of them will crumble with that look of disapproval or with a certain way of saying something. Then I go back to when I was five and I remember my first grade teacher reprimanding me for talking when all I was doing was telling the boy behind me to stop playing with my hair. I got in trouble and she sent me to the end of the line as my punishment, so I would be the last one in the room. I can still remember how mortified I felt. So then I thought, everything I say to these children are things they might remember or will remember when they’re adults. I know my words are very important
HCCLU: What do you see in your students here at Cal Lutheran?
JF: Here at Cal Lu, I feel like because a lot of you are away from home for the first time or you’re dealing with hardcore stress from your classes and this is expensive, there’s a different kind of pressure. You’re also looking at your careers and succeeding and making a pathway for yourself, for life, and some people are dealing with relationships or family issues, or financial issues and all of that can just be incredibly stressful. Some people come in and have dance class and it gives you a relief because you can just move and have fun and develop relationships with students in a way that you don’t get in a chemistry class.HCCLU: Have you learned something from your students?
JF: I am always being reminded that there are all sorts of stories out there. Everyone has a past, present, and whatever their future will be. There are influences from different cultures, from where you’ve lived, what kind of financial situation you’re in. So it helps me remember that there is so much need in the world to give back and also to love, because you don’t know what that person is going through. People can just walk into this class and have just lost a loved one or something traumatic happen and you wouldn’t know. It’s a reminder that every person has their life and all the issues that they have to deal with and that leads to a reminder of being present, and open to people’s emotions and what they’re going through.
HCCLU: Do you have a favorite quote?
JF: The John Lennon quote from his song “Beautiful Boy”, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”. That one definitely resonates with me; we’re so busy doing so many other things, that life just goes on and passes along and all of a sudden you’re 80.
HCCLU: Do you have any advice or words of wisdom for us college students?
JF: From my own experience when I was in college, and also hearing some of the things students have said, truly enjoy the experience of being here at Cal Lu and do as much as you can to experience those group events, the lectures, the things that they give you outside of your regular classroom. Take time to go out into the nature that’s around here and let go of getting sucked into social media. Have more face time with people versus computer time. Take time to take care of yourself because this age is fleeting and find ways to keep movement in your life, forever. Truly enjoy each gift that you give and that you’re given even if you feel like it’s difficult. Trees grow deeper roots in adversity from the wind, as the wind pushes against them. So that adversity that you might face, something that you feel is a negative, will build a stronger character in you. Sometimes we do need to cry and let it all out, but remember that it’s also a way to grow deeper as a human being. Enjoy life because we don’t know when our time is up. Smile at strangers and friends, be more positive, and let go of thinking about what other people are thinking about you and beating yourself down. That sucks energy from ourselves and also projects more negativity out to the world, which people react to. We tend to be self-critical, I think way too much, and some of us that are more perfectionists we tend to nitpick about everything. But manners are important, being kind, being courteous, being respectful to ourselves, to the Earth, and to others.
All images are courtesy of the author