Mountain Air Dance is a non-profit dance company founded in 2009 by Cathy Stone Werner, MFA. Our mission is to bring quality aerial arts and contemporary dance to the Gallatin Valley and beyond through classes, workshops, and performances. We strive to inspire and motivate people, help people find their inner strength, and to create more joy in life through aerial arts and dance. We believe that performing arts are a necessity for many and that dance and aerial arts empowers people of all ages and encourages them to be positive contributors in the community.
Our Mission
Board of Directors
Cathy Stone Werner
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Cathy Stone Werner is a gymnast turned modern dancer who loves to fly! She graduated from Texas State University in 2000 with a B.S. in Dance and then went on to complete the M.F.A. program in Choreography at the University of Colorado in 2003. Cathy has taught and performed with Frequent Flyers Productions, an innovative aerial dance company in Boulder, Colorado; as well as Wicked Sister Dance Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Cathy founded Mountain Air Dance in 2009; Montana's first aerial dance company. Her classes, workshops and performances have thrilled Bozeman and surrounding communities ever since. Cathy continues to learn new styles and approaches to teaching, performing and choreographing wherever life takes her and has a love for sharing aerial arts with her community.
Through the melding of modern dance, gymnastics, yoga, pilates and aerial arts Cathy has created her own choreographic and teaching style that moves dancers through the vertical space on the stage and creates strong healthy dancers. She believes in the healthful benefits of dance and strives to pass her knowledge and love for the art on to future generations.
Blair Bodie
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Blair Bodie is co-founder of BodiGram Dance Company. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with an MFA in choreography and received her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in dance. She performed with Ground Zero Dance Co., Kelly Donovan and Dancers, Joey Liew, Dance Theater of Shannon, Number 9, Joe Goode Performance Group, Cali and Company, Zaccho Dance, and Cat Call Choir. She left her native home of Virginia to teach dance, pilates, and yoga in Malaysia; where she returned regularly to produce dance works and conduct yoga workshops. Outside of her graduate school studies in NYC, her local work focused on choreography for Clay Chapman’s up and coming theater group, The Pumpkin Pie Show, and building “.... And Dancers” collective. She left NYC, to establish herself in the San Francisco Bay area as a dance theater artist. She now lives in Bozeman, MT, where she is helping to build the contemporary dance scene with Collective Movement and raising two young adventurists and movement enthusiasts.
Mariah Palmer
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Mariah is an artist and naturalist. She loves to create atmospheres, whether through her art projects, dance collaborations, or design work. You can find her making art in her home studio, teaching nature-craft workshops around town, and building community around art and activism through her organization, the Local Earth Collective.
She studied Clothing, Textiles & Design at the University of Idaho, yet, her parents are her greatest teachers. Both craftspeople and deeply rooted in the natural world, they shepherded her into the mountains, lakes, rivers, and hot springs of central Idaho while showing how to bring those elements of nature into art and craft.
She first discovered Mountain Air Dance when her daughter attended a summer camp. Seeing her daughter perform on silks brought tears to her eyes, and she immediately knew they had stumbled onto something special. She later got to know Cathy through the local modern dance circle, and fun collaborations emerged between them. She is excited to lend her design eye and entrepreneurial spirit to the mission of Mountain Air Dance.
She lives outside Bozeman with her husband, 9-year-old daughter, and animals—both domestic and wild.