Former Laker Girl Shares Love of Dance

Alice Chien, a Walnut High alumna, opened Dancecapade Performing Arts Center in Diamond Bar in 2004.
By Melanie C. Johnson
Diamond Bar Patch
August 4, 2011

Alice Chien’s start in dance was a reluctant one.

The Walnut High School alumna took her first class at five years old, largely because she had no choice.

“I didn’t want to go,” Chien said. “I danced because my mom made me go.”

More than three decades later, the 36-year-old Chino Hills resident has not only developed a passion for dance, she is sharing her love of the art form with her students as the owner of Dancecapade Performing Arts Center in Diamond Bar.

Her Yellow Brick Road studio offers classes in jazz, ballet, tap, salsa, hip hop and lyrical dance for children and teens, as well as yoga and Zumba for adults.

Chien opened the studio in 2004, but she has been teaching since she was 18. Her interest in dance deepened while she was a student at Suzanne Middle School.

Suzanne had a dance club on campus and Chien started to perform. At Walnut High, she was on the dance team. For the quiet young girl who never said a word in class, dancing provided a means of expression, she said.

“Dance is like an outlet,” she said. “You don’t have to talk. You just move your body. You feel really good when you’re moving and dancing.”

Chien said she enjoyed dancing as a hobby, but never thought it for a career.

She juggled her studies at USC while a member of the university’s dance team. After graduating, she worked as a financial analyst for a real estate company.

But she kept dancing, this time on a much larger stage.

The year was 1999 and it was the height of the Los Angeles Lakers’ Shaquille O’Neal-Kobe Bryant era. Chien found herself vying for a spot on the Laker girls, along with around 600 other hopefuls. She made the squad.

Chien said she never took to watching basketball on television, but enjoyed the close up look she got in the four years she was with the Laker girls.

“It’s very exciting when you’re down on the floor,” she said.

Chien retired from the squad in 2003 and got married. She did a few commercials, music videos and television shows, but knew that she didn’t want to make performing her career.

Her dad’s friend owned a building on Yellow Brick Road and Chien decided to try renting it and put her teaching experience and business acumen to work for her.

“I wasn’t planning to have a dance studio,” she said. “It just happened.”

She named the center Dancecapade after the Janet Jackson song “Escapade,” which she loved to play to warm up her classes, she said.

Each year, she puts on a recital at Citrus College so her students can experience what it is like to perform on stage.

Katrina Hirabayashi’s daughter Zoe, 9, has been studying dance at the studio for two years. She takes ballet, jazz and tap, as well as tumbling.

Hirabayashi said the studio is well run. Chien pushes her students, but also makes it enjoyable and keeps it developmentally appropriate for them, she said.

“She is a perfect combination of strict and fun,” Hirabayashi said. “There is a very positive atmosphere in the studio. It’s just a feeling you get.”