Rockettes' Karen Keeler Opens Up About Dancing With The Radio City Company

The Rockettes this year will be celebrating 85 years on the stage and Time Out New York got a chance to speak to Karen Keeler a 13-year veteran and she opens up about what it is to be a Rockette and her start as a dancer.

Time Out New York asked how she got in to dancing at the age of six and the Showtime dancer said. "I grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania. I started taking ballet initially at a small school, but I had a really wonderful teacher who had come from Scotland, and her name was Constance Reynolds.

She had had pretty severe knee injuries from her career and had stopped dancing and could only teach, basically, from sitting in a chair, so my initial training was very much one on one: Me, at the ballet barre, privately, with her sitting in a chair next to me," said Keeler.

Time Out probed the dancer and found out if she came from a dancing background and if whether or not her family took on dancing.

"No. Nobody did! In my family, everyone's sort of on the math and science end. I somehow turned out a dancer. I did have an aunt that danced, and that might have been an early connection, but other than that, nobody else did."

When asked about what it took to be a Rockette Keeler in terms of training and fitness regime and what she does personally to meet the Rockette requirement she said. "I take ballet class and contemporary class. I do a technique called Physique 57, and I also teach it. It keeps me prepared for this work."

Keeler who teaches talked about technique and wants to tell people that Rockettes are not just a static movement troupe and she thinks that there is more versatility to what they do.

"I work with a lot of girls, and they all have great dance training in terms of their ballet, their tap and their jazz, but I feel like there's such a fine line between putting those techniques together to find what this kind of work is, because it's not strictly one or the other. It's like you have to mesh them all together.

That's the first thing. I'll get a really strong ballet dancer, but she has no attack in her body. So it's meshing that together and then layering on the discipline of being really sharp but being able to finesse the choreography to not look robotic. Again, to make it a little more humanized. Sometimes I feel people associate our sharp, clean precision with being robotic. But it has to ease out and be human again," she said.