Welcome to Engage Movement Arts!
We offer Pilates Rehabilitation and Dance Medicine services to focus on injury recovery for dancers as well as the non-dance population. Denver native and Pilates Instructor, Amy Anderson NCPT, has almost 30 years experience and is well-known in both the Denver Pilates and Dance communities for her expertise as a rehabilitative therapist and knowledge of dance technique and correction.
Engage Movement Arts works with a wide range of clientele from high level professional and pre-professional dancers to senior citizens with joint replacements and injuries to clients recovering from serious injuries and surgeries. Every single client receives specific exercise and corrective movement sequences customized individually for each person’s specific needs.
Email to make an appointment today!
Our address is 2496 W. 2nd Avenue Denver, CO 80223
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About Amy Anderson
"Amy really knows the body. Amy teaches body awareness and wisdom and self-healing. Her extensive, life-long dance background gives her a anesthetic empathy that enables her to understand somatically what is going on in another person’s body. She has tailored her finely tuned, exacting training to provide her the tools to solve physical issues and to give her clients ownership of healing their own bodies."
"My experience with Amy was that she downloaded to me her somatic awareness of my muscular challenges, gifting me with a tailor-made movement routine that has helped me to turn what could have been a chronic issue into a solvable challenge that I am equipped to handle. I am very grateful!"
Amy began her Pilates career with the story so common with many Pilates instructors. She had a career as a professional ballet dancer performing with Colorado Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet and finally with David Taylor Dance Theatre in Denver as well as many other local companies for about 15 years. During her professional career, Amy also taught ballet to adults and children for 20 years. She directed the school for David Taylor Dance Theatre, taught at the Arvada Center, and Littleton Ballet Academy and many others.
After a serious dance-related injury in 1990, Amy began her studies as a Pilates Instructor with an emphasis on dance medicine and injury rehabilitation. She became certified as a Pilates Instructor with a Dance Medicine Emphasis at St. Francis Hospital Center for Sports and Dance Medicine in San Francisco, CA by Elizabeth Larkham 1991.
Her Pilates training and interest in helping clients with chronic pain was supplemented by many Physical Therapists at the Englewood Physical Therapy Clinic, HealthSouth, and finally, Colorado Center For Physical Therapy. She has studied continually with many Pilates lineages including Kathy Grant and Cara Reeser, Eve Gentry and Michelle Larson, Jillian Hessel, and Master teachers such as Madeleine Black, Lise Stolz, and Marika Molnar through out her Pilates career. She became certified by the PMA in the first exam set by the Alliance in 2005. In 2008, Amy left Colorado Center for Physical Therapy where she worked as a movement rehabilitation instructor for 13 years as well as managing their Pilates studio Motion on Mainstreet. She began her private practice, formerly Gentle Fitness, now Engage Movement Arts, and has been thriving ever since.
Starting in 2012 she met Jon Zahourek, creator of the Anatomy in Clay® Learning System and began training. She started teaching workshops utilizing the Anatomy in Clay® Learning System combined with exercise instruction as of 2013. She taught the Core at the Pilates Method Alliance International Conference in San Diego 2014. Since 1995, Amy has been teaching Injury Prevention workshops for Pilates Instructors and at local dance schools including Colorado Ballet, International Ballet School, Denver Ballet Academy, Vail International Dance Academy among others. Anatomy in Clay® and Maniken® are registered trademarks of Zahourek Systems, Inc. and affiliates in the US or other countries. Authorization for limited trademark use licensed by Zahourek Systems, Inc., a sole provider of Anatomy in Clay® Learning System.
For the last 15 years she has had a private practice, Engage Movement Arts in Denver. Though all her study of Pilates and rehabilitation of her own back injury, Amy learned to control and eventually completely heal her back. She discovered Argentine Tango in 2004 and has reconnected with dance. She taught and performed Argentine Tango with Parasol Arts and Natural Tango until 2020. She is grateful to Pilates and the many people she trained with over the years that allowed her to heal her injury, find a new career in Pilates but continue to dance and perform at a high level with out pain. Her most recent performance for the 10 year anniversary of Parasol Arts was September of 2022. After leaving ballet for tango, Amy is back taking ballet classes at The Denver Dance Center where her private practice resides. She is also going back to teaching ballet at Denver Dance Center and has come full circle back to the art form she has always loved.
Amy's certifications include: Dance Medicine Specialist by Saint Francis Hospital, San Francisco, CA; Accredited Pilates teacher-trainer, certified by the Pilates Method Alliance since 2005, Amy Anderson PMA-CPT.