By MOLLY DAVIDSON / Staff Writer

PELHAM—The Stevan Grebel Center for Dance welcomes two guest teachers this summer. Accomplished dancers Michelle Alexander and Tatiana Ledovskikh will lead special workshops at the studio in July.

Ledovskikh is an experienced ballerina and has danced with the renown Russian Bolshoi Ballet Academy in Moscow and spent 20 years with the Alabama Ballet Company. She is a familiar face at the Grebel Dance Center and has taught several classes in the past.

“She was always going back and forth (between Russia and the United States) dancing,” studio director Deborah Grebel said. “She’s been here several years, at least in the past five years she has been by every year.”

Ledovskikh will lead several advanced workshops in ballet, pointe and variations. Grebel said Ledovskikh arrived from Moscow on July 1, and dates for her classes are yet to be determined.

Michelle Alexander will also lead several special workshops from July 21 through August 1. Alexander has experience in a wide variety of dance, including jazz, modern and ballet, and she has danced with companies across the country.

“She’s very versatile,” Grebel said of Alexander. “She has never been here with us before…we heard about her from some students who came from Shreveport.”

Alexander’s stop at the Grebel Dance Center will be her last before she relocates to France to teach at the American Academy of Dance in Paris. Alexander will lead classes in jazz, contemporary and world dance and a workshop on ballet mime and acting for the ballet dancer.

“It’s a technique,” Grebel said of ballet acting. “In story ballet, there’s always mime and some acting, (dancers) use expressiveness in their arms and face to describe what they’re doing.”

Grebel encouraged anyone interested in more information about Alexander and Ledovskikh’s classes, as well as any other programs offered at the Grebel Dance Center, to stop by the studio or visit the studio’s website at Grebeldance.com.