“You can choose to make a dance about anything — or nothing. The sky's the limit.”

After Kate Loughlin graduated from Connecticut College in 1998 with a degree in dance, she moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., where she worked a few jobs and landed a few small dance roles. She had been in New York for about a year when one of her former teachers recommended her for a job teaching dance at Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Conn. She was 23.

“That kind of came out of the blue for me,” Kate said. She accepted what was then more of a part-time role and went on to help build the program at Choate.

“I found out I really loved teaching,” Kate said. “When I got hired there, I said, ‘OK, I want to be a dancer in New York City.’ But I thought, ‘Oh, I can get paid to dance every day. Awesome.’ And I was so inspired by my teachers in middle school, high school, and college, and I was quite young and had all this new information I’d just learned from college and being in New York. I said, ‘I can pass that on. I can do this for three to four years, and I can go to city and audition if I want.’ But I became invested in teaching and in my students, and I have made a career of it.”

Kate was at Choate for 10 years and has been at Loomis Chaffee since 2009. If dancing professionally was on her mind years ago, so too was teaching.

“Even in college,” Kate said, “I thought if I could be like my mentor Liese was for me — if I could be that for someone else — that would make me happy. I will have fulfilled my purpose.”

Liese is Leise Hammontree, her dance teacher from sixth through 12th grade at St. Paul’s School in Maryland, where Kate grew up. They are friends to this day. Ms. Hammontree also helped teach Kate sewing and costuming skills. Kate has been doing the costuming for dancers in recent years. “She was a big influence on my life,” Kate said.

Kate’s father is of Irish heritage, and Kate learned Irish step dancing when she was 3 ½ years old. She started ballet in first grade and did modern, jazz, and tap in middle school and high school. Another mentor of Kate's was Dan Waggoner, internationally known as a modern dancer, choreographer, and professor of dance, who taught Kate at Connecticut College. Mr. Waggoner died in January, and many former Conn College dance students attended a memorial for Mr. Waggoner at the Paul Taylor Studios in New York City in March. Mr. Waggoner was a member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company for a number of years before starting his own New York-based company, according to his obituary. Many of his former Conn College students who attended his memorial are still in some aspect of the dance business.

To listen to Kate talk about what dance does for someone mentally, emotionally, and physically is to feel her joy.

“We dance because it feels good, but it is hard,” Kate said. “You’re sore, you’re tried, but it feels amazing to be physically expressing yourself. We like shapes and space, feeling ourselves move through the world in an expressive way. As I said, the selfish reason is it feels good, but from a creative standpoint it is an interesting way to process our world. You can choose to make a dance about anything — or nothing. The sky's the limit. If you want to tackle a certain theme or idea, you get to come at it a different way than if you were writing an article about it. If you wanted to tackle the idea of depression, for example, you can still do all the research, and then you get to translate that into your body and the space around you in a 3D representation of what you’re trying to express and wrap your head around. And that is really cool to me.”

"Dance is very ephemeral,” Kate continued. “You don’t have a script that is printed and you can read 400 years from now. You don't have a piece of artwork hanging on the wall that you can walk through a museum and see over and over again. You watch dance once, and it is done because it moves through time and space. So you have to be very present to experience it. Even if you are doing repertoire, where you do the same dance over and over again, because we are living, breathing, dynamic bodies, you’re never really doing the same dance twice because you are not the same person you were the last time you did that dance.”

Kate doesn’t have to be concerned with when and how she gets in a workout. Teaching is her workout —  the exercises and stretches, the moves and jumps, the core, the legs, the arms.

“I sometimes have to step back and remember, ‘You’ve been teaching these exercises for 25 years. They are learning these exercises, so stop and break it down for them, talk about what they need to feel where and where this energy is coming from,’” she said.

The dance studio in the John D. and Alexandra C. Nichols Center for Theater and Dance is where all the teaching plays out — and pays off.

“My students are super amazing, and we always have a great time,” Kate said.

One of the intrinsic rewards of Kate’s work is seeing a dancer learn a move that provided a challenge and required hard work. “That lightbulb moment,” Kate said, “when working in the studio and someone is working on something and they get it, everyone is yeah! We are all there for each other. We learn from each other, we feed off each other’s energy. We are excited for each other’s growth.”