General Info

Brekke Dance Center (formerly Paula Brekke School of Dance and Tumbling), is a dance studio based in Des Moines, Iowa and Grimes, Iowa. It specializes in providing high quality dance education. Now a family business, Brekke Dance Center continues to do just that as it has done for over 25 years. Our forever growing dance family has continued to help students and teachers grow in more ways than one. Brekke Dance Center was founded in 1986 under the name Paula Brekke School of Dance as a sole proprietorship, with only one instructor, Paula Brekke. We offered ballet, jazz, tap, and tumbling with one dance studio in Des Moines, Iowa. Several years later we started competing, and were known for our jazz and tumbling. When dancers announced our name on the stage of a competition they added "and tumbling" leading to our first name change: Paula Brekke School of Dance and tumbling: PBSODAT! When Matthew Brekke graduated from college in 2007, we changed the name again to accommodate Matt into our now family run business: Brekke Dance Center, LLC. Both of Paula's adult children work for this organization, Lizz doing music editing and teaching tumbling, and Matthew in charge of all dance teams. We pride ourselves on the variety of dance that we teach. Our dancers are extremely well-rounded. We compete all genres of dance from lyrical, jazz, musical theater, tap, and contemporary. We are successful at all of them. We are constantly told by judges how amazed they are that "we can do it all." Paula is most influenced by musical theater that has played an important part of her life. Matthew has a love for many genres including modern and contemporary based on the training he received from the University of Arizona. In 2011 we acquired a studio in Grimes, Iowa - It's a fabulous group of dancers that have improved so much since we started out there. We love Grimes people! (And the whole community out there -we have dancers from Dallas Center, Granger, Urbandale, Waukee, Johnston, and Ankeny, to name a few.