Woodside, NY · founded 2011
About the school
Weekly dance and music classes for children and adults in Woodside, Queens — small classes, one teacher who knows your child's name, and a fee you can work out yourself.
How it started
Marisol Duarte trained in classical ballet from childhood and danced professionally for more than a decade before she stopped and spent some years teaching in other people's schools. What she opened on 61st Street in 2011 was a first-floor room and fourteen students, which is a small enough number that she still remembers who several of them were. The room, the students and most of the reasoning behind how the school is run trace back to that first year rather than to a plan drawn up in advance of it.
“A class of twenty-four is not a class, it is a room with music in it.” is how she puts the whole argument for staying small, and it is the sentence that this school's class sizes are built around rather than a slogan chosen after the fact. Her own account of the school's first years, and of teaching every ballet class above the first level herself for that reason, is on her own page.
What this deliberately is not
There is no competition team here, and no student is prepared for or entered into a named board's graded examinations — a real distinction that is easy to blur and that we would rather state plainly than let a parent discover in a brochure from a different school. The full reasoning for both is on their own pages: We do not enter students for a named board's examinations and There are no auditions for any class in this school.
It is also not a franchise. Woodside Academy of Dance & Music, LLC is one business at one address, and there is no second building carrying this name for a licence fee to have paid for. And it is not growing quickly, which is a choice rather than a ceiling: work with us says plainly that hiring here is rare, and the reason given there is the same reason a class stays small — a school run by more people than it needs to be is a different, worse product than the one this site describes.
The building, in brief
Three dance studios and three music rooms, on two floors, and the rates for hiring any of them outside class times are the same numbers a class fee is built from: a published rate, shown rather than quoted over the telephone.
| Room | Floor | Holds | What it is | Hire, an hour |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Studio A | Ground | 18 | Thirty-four by twenty-six feet, sprung maple, full mirror wall, double barre. The recital rehearsal room. | $55 |
| Studio B | Ground | 14 | Twenty-eight by twenty feet, sprung floor, mirrors on two walls. Most of the junior classes. | $45 |
| Studio C | First | 10 | Twenty-two by eighteen feet, marley over sprung timber, which is the surface tap wants. | $38 |
| Music Room 1 | First | 8 | The large music room: an upright piano, eight chairs and stands. | $28 |
| Music Room 2 | First | 8 | Strings and musicianship. Eight chairs, stands, and a piano for accompaniment. | $28 |
| Music Room 3 | First | 4 | A single teaching room. Private lessons only — it is not big enough for a class. | Not hired out |
The whole building, and what the corridor holds
How this school decides things
Most of what a parent wants to know about a school is not on a page like this one — it is who decides when a class is full, who decides how long a six-year-old stands on a stage, and what happens when a decision costs the school money. So: Marisol decides when a class is full, in the studio, one class at a time, which is the reason the waiting list on this site is a real queue with a real position rather than a form that says somebody will be in touch. Grace decides how long each age group is on stage at the summer recital, and it is a technical judgement about attention and nerves rather than about which class she likes best — she will explain it to anybody who asks. Elena is the person most likely to tell a family that their child should stop piano for a term rather than keep paying to dread it. And a class that falls below four enrolled students may be closed at the end of a term, with everybody in it told at least three weeks before that happens rather than finding out when the next invoice does not arrive.
This is a demonstration website. This is a demonstration website. Woodside Academy of Dance & Music is not a real school, no enrolment made on this site reserves a place anywhere, no child is registered by it, and the telephone number is a placeholder. It was built to show what a small school gets for a fixed price.
Fall Term 2026 · six teachers, and every one of them teaches
Come and see it before you decide anything
A trial class is a real class, taught by the person who would actually teach your child every week. It is the only evidence about a school that is not marketing, and it costs nothing for exactly that reason.