Veleska Wyatt is the Artistic Director for Kainos Dance. It is her desire to increase the awareness of liturgical praise dance through education and performance. After many years of training in ballet and modern dance at The Watertown School of Dance and the Westover School Dance Ensemble in Connecticut, Veleska was accepted via audition into the Vassar College Repertory Dance Theater (VRDT). While with VRDT, her love for God and dance merged and resulted in her first liturgical dance piece entitled “Metamorphosis” . During graduate school at Baylor University in Texas, she was led to form a liturgical dance ministry at her local church. With worship as the focus, she taught her dancers basic dance technique and introduced choreography that incorporated elements of modern, ballet and hip-hop.
Upon completion of her studies, she and her husband moved to Richmond, VA. Their twins were born in 2003. Soon she found herself dancing liturgically, but for a different audience…her children. Born three months premature, the babies were hospitalized in the NICU for three months. Once they arrived home, they required intensive therapy and continuous care. Due to the demands of caring for the preemies, she put dancing publicly on hold. But something began to happen as she spent countless hours with her children, she started choreographing again. An educator at heart, she found creative ways to teach her children basic sign language, and found signing to be a very expressive form of worship.
Combining sign language with worship and various dance styles, she continued dancing for and with her children as part of their daily social and spiritual education. Within a few years of one another, both children were diagnosed with a form of autism- her daughter with moderate Autism Spectrum Disorder and her son with a milder form of Asperger’s Syndrome. Both children required significant attention in the area of communication. Liturgical dance and sign language became a pronounced part of their lives. As the kids grew older, her hearts’ desire was to dance and choreograph again for her local church.
In 2006, she was asked to join her church praise dance team, but this time something was different; those years of relative isolation, prayer and meditation had honed her liturgical dance skills, instilled a new sense of appreciation for the blessings in her life and encouraged her to create a new form of movement language for praise in motion. Today both children communicate with words. Her son’s verbal and reading skills are above grade level, and her daughter produces more spontaneous words/sentences on a regular basis. Kainos Dance will always be the type of place that believes in miracles!
Kainos Dance Mission:
We pray that by the time a student has completed one dance session, they will not only breathe the Word it into their being, but also move forward in their relationship with Christ, increase their knowledge of dance technique, and develop a form of worship that they can take wherever God leads them.
For in Him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.”
Acts 17:28
Breathe… Move… Dance…Worship
