Roco Dance & Fitness

Annie Rosenthal Parr is a native of Mill Valley, California. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts 1990. She was a member of Della Davidson Dance and Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. Annie founded RoCo Dance and Fitness in 1993. She is a dancer, choreographer, teacher and proprietress.
RoCo Dance and Fitness is a training center for children and adults. It holds over one hundred classes weekly in its four studios. RoCo’s youth program, a growing student body of 600 dancers and families, embodies a curriculum of beginning through advanced training in modern, jazz, ballet, hip-hop, break dancing, partnering, composition. The adult program specializes in beginning through professional dance training, hybrid dance fitness workouts, yoga, Pilates and traditional sculpting and spin classes. RoCo produces RoCo Dance Onstage, a bi-annual open participation student performance held at the 2000 seat theater of Marin Center. Body Language, RoCo’s pre-professional youth dance company, performs throughout the Bay Area and prepares young dancers for college and careers in dance. RoCo employs 25 Bay Area dance and fitness professionals whom many have been teaching under the direction of Annie for more than ten years. They are some of the Bay Area’s most influential and accomplished people in their industry. They are acclaimed choreographers, master teachers, dance curators, studio owners and college professors. Annie also trains and gives guidance to new instructors by assembling a comprehensive structure for dance and fitness classes of all levels and genres.
Outside of Annie’s career at RoCo, she presents work as an independent choreographer and dancer since 1996. She performs in her own work and that of other artists including David Dorfman, Jo Kreiter and Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts. Her choreography is selected for many Northern California dance festivals and Universities. Her piece entitled "Flash" was selected for American College Dance Festival's gala performance in 2006. Theater Bay Area CASH Grant, Zellerbach Family Fund and the Marin Arts Council have funded Annie’s work. Annie has been teaching dance and fitness classes for over 15 years, regularly at RoCo and as a guest instructor at ODC, San Francisco, UCLA, and SF State.
She teaches workshops in Switzerland and currently is a dance lecturer at University of California, Berkeley.
Annie's approach to teaching is accessible to all type of dancers. Her technical and expressive aesthetic is a unique movement vocabulary that continues to evolve through her constant enthusiasm for dance and performance. Annie's class encourages and teaches multi-dimensional movement. She’s interested in students recognizing one’s own movement habits and acquiring new ones. Her teaching emphasizes efficiency of movement, the use of explosive power, sensitivity, texture, phrasing and clarity. The material presented is a progression of physical challenges that inform and builds onto it. The phases are musically inspired and paced to safely warm up the body and maximize strength and placement.

Alexis Kushner (Manager of RoCo D &F ) has been a part of the RoCo community throughout the past 11 years, flowing in and out of RoCo as both a student and receptionist, and returning in 2005 as the manager. Alexis began dancing locally at age three. She studied with several dance schools in the San Francisco Bay Area including, Miss Tillys, Happy Feet, Marin Ballet, and RoCo Dance & Fitness. She has a background in ballet, modern, tap, and jazz. Alexis is a California State Art Scholar, attended the California State Summer School for the Arts and the American Dance Festival at Duke University. Alexis graduated with honors, from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2003 where she studied dance, Spanish and political science. Alexis spent a year abroad in Barcelona, Spain furthering her studies. She also lived in the Hague, Netherlands working for the Department of State in the U.S. Embassy. Returning to San Francisco in 2004 Alexis worked as a research assistant and event planner for a non-profit think tank. Alexis is a fitness enthusiast and enjoys dance, yoga, pilates, spinning, cardio boxing, and outdoor activities. She has a love for children and believes that dance is a positive and important activity for youth and adults of all ages, which has strongly impacted her own life.