The Robin Dawn Academy Holiday Showcase 2025 takes place at the Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall on Monday, December 15. Academy dancers ages 3–18 will light up the stage with high-energy routines in every style — ballet, jazz, hip hop, and more — set to favorite holiday hits.
“We have close to 400 students in the Christmas show this coming Monday,” said Robin Dawn Ryan. “It’s a very variety-type show. It's a way for our parents and the community to see what the kids have been doing since August in their classes.”
The Academy has been staging its holiday show since its inception 51 years ago. It moved the annual holiday performance to the Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall two years ago so that its 400 students can all perform on the same night.
Not all 400 students are onstage at once.
“They are all different numbers,” Ryan said. “We have tap, jazz, ballet, hip-hop, acro, lyrical and contemporary - a little bit of everything for everyone to enjoy.”
Each dance number is set to Christmas music, with that discipline’s instructor providing the choreography for the routine.
“The ages are as young as two-and-a-half and as old as 18," she said.
Ryan teaches jazz, so she chose the music and created the choreography for her junior jazz and high school jazz classes.
“My little kids are dancing to a Gaga song, ‘Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” Ryan shared. “I didn't know Lady Gaga sang it, and I've never used it before. But I look for songs that I haven't used over the past 51 years, which is very hard to do. So, they're doing that song. It's quite fun.”
Jordan Hahn handled the music and choreography for the hip-hop numbers in the show.
Hahn has been a part of the Robin Dawn dance family since the age of 3 and won numerous awards as part of the Academy’s competition team. She then attended Troy University as a dance major. After spending the last five months training in New York City at the Broadway Dance Center’s Professional Semester program, she is back home to further her choreography and teaching career under Robin Dawn.
Hahn’s credits include performing as a backup dancer in two music videos with Elliot Divorin, as a backup dancer for a German pop singer, and in collaboration with well-known choreographers like Marinda Davis, Mandy Moore, Mia Micheals and Nijawwon Matthews. She has also choreographed multiple musicals in Southwest Florida.
“She's got a real flair for that,” Ryan said. “The audience really loves hip-hop, but then again, they love it all.”
The tap numbers in “Holiday Showcase 2025” were choreographed by Jennifer Pertner and Charity Molloy.
“The audience might be seeing a sleigh ride in there for tap,” Ryan teased. “We love our tap at our studio.”
Pertner was born and raised in Cape Coral. She began dancing with Robin Dawn when she was 3-years-old and has taught with Ryan since 1993. She choreographs and instructs the Petite Legends and Spotlights Competition Teams. Pertner graduated from Florida Gulf Coast University with a bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education. She has won numerous choreography awards, while her students have been acknowledged with many high point awards in regional and national competitions.
Molloy, too, began her dance training at the age of three. She predominately trained under the direction of Kim Hall and Amy Rhoda-Taylor. Additionally, she took classes from dance legends such as Jackie Sleight, Frank Hatchett, Roland Dupree, Joe Tremaine, and Mia Michaels. She has been teaching dance for 26 years in the genres of tap, jazz, musical theater, ballet, lyrical, contemporary, acrobatics, and pre-school combination classes. She has choreographed as part of a studio as well as free-lance for individuals for competitions, auditions, performances, and beauty pageants as well as for theater companies, middle school and high school dance teams and show choirs. Molloy taught at the Heidelberg School of the Arts in Germany for three years and was the director of the tap and jazz programs there.
“So, all our teachers work together and put their numbers together for the show,” Ryan said. “Our kids are very well-rounded. Most of them take a little bit of everything. They're not just one style, so they're very good at that."
Over its 51-year tenure as Cape Coral’s oldest dance academy, Robin Dawn Ryan students have achieved success at the high school, collegiate and professional level, with a number of alumni working on Broadway and Off Broadway, in television and on cruise ships. Several have opened their own dance studios. Many \teach dance themselves.
“We just keep going and bringing more students in because if that's their dream to be a professional dancer. We want to point them in the right direction,” said Ryan.
Ryan is also in high demand outside the Academy. She is currently directing “A Christmas Carol” at Fort Myers Theatre, where she serves as resident director/choreographer.
“I'm also choreographing ‘Legally Blonde’ at Canterbury and I’ll be directing and choreographing ‘Little Mermaid’ at Bishop Verot High School in the spring.”
You can view Robin Dawn Ryan’s bio and credits here.
Monday’s performance is at 6 p.m. For tickets, telephone 800-440-7469 or 239-481-4849 or visit https://www.bbmannpah.com/events/detail/robin-dawn-academy-holiday-showcase-2025.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
