about
IMPULSE DANCE
Michaela Collings – Founder of Impulse Dance
Michaela set up Impulse Dance in 2021 to fulfil her dream of bringing dance to a wide range of ages and abilities in her local area of Staines.
Having mostly danced ballet throughout her childhood and teenage years, she didn’t feel there was a place for her in the professional dance world because of neither having the body nor the flexibility to become a ballerina. However, she continued to take ballet, modern and contemporary dance lessons, even on student exchanges in Spain and during her gap year in Australia. While doing a degree in cultural studies, Michaela also started teaching contemporary dance classes at the university sports organisation and worked with the My Way-Ensemble, a dance company for dancers aged 60 to 90. She realised then that she did not only enjoy her dance work more, but she also put a lot more time and effort into it than into her studies. After graduating, she worked as a project manager for the creative arts charity Create, where she saw dance and other arts practitioners working with a range of vulnerable people and achieving wonderful things through dance and arts such as building the participants’ confidence, helping them to make friends, and bringing joy to their lives.
Realising that dance has so much to offer, Michaela finally found her ‘calling’ in the dance world and gained a Postgraduate Diploma in Community Dance at Trinity Laban in 2013. Since then, she worked as a freelance dance facilitator with several companies and organisations including Dance Umbrella, Watermans, Age UK, Trinity Laban, Stanwell Events, Dance Woking, and Artis. She has experience in working with a variety of ages and abilities, including babies and toddlers, primary school children and older adults as well as children with physical and/or mental disabilities.
Most recently Michaela co-founded a community interest company called IAMFlow with the mission to create fully accessible opportunities for movement and health&wellbeing activities in underserved communities in her local area.
She holds an enhanced DBS and is a professional member of ‘People Dancing’, the Foundation for Community Dance.
Michaela lives in Staines and loves baking cakes with a huge chocolate and/or Nutella content. She often dances around the house but usually gets told ‘Mama, stop dancing’ by her two children.
