Dancer returns to roots at West Las Vegas Arts Center

West Las Vegas Arts Center performance ensemble member Dedrick Stewart was visibly tired after the fifth run-through of his solo routine to Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City.”

Teacher Avree Walker, who stands 6-foot-1, watched intensely and picked out steps Stewart could improve on.

“You’ve got to color in the picture, not just show the outline,” Walker said as he demonstrated how he envisioned the solo for the ensemble’s upcoming performance piece “Suite Soul.” Throughout the two-hour rehearsal, he critiqued the dancers’ steps until they had enough “expression and character,” which he said is just as important as moves.

“Avree is very passionate and he comes off almost as a perfectionist, but it makes his dancing more live,” ensemble dance member Lay’la Rogers said. “His dances tell a story. It’s more about the people in them and not just the dancing.”

Walker is teaching at the same place where he got his start at age 12. Back then, he joined the arts center’s performing and visual arts summer camp and the youth performance ensemble, which performs throughout the year. Most students in the ensemble are alumni of the camp program, he said. At 26, he’s mentoring students to whom he can relate.

The center’s senior cultural specialist, Melissa Jewel Jeppe, has watched Walker progress over the years.

“He was always super talented and inquisitive,” she said. “It kind of feeds our soul (that he teaches here) because we have many (alumni) who have gone on to do beautiful things, whether it’s in the arts or in business.”

During his camp days, he participated in the dance, theater and music program, but it wasn’t until he was 17 that he decided to get serious about dance. By age 19, he was asked to be the youth director for the performance ensemble. This summer also was his first time working as the camp’s co-artistic director, along with theater mentor Antonio “Huggy Bear” Fargas.

Before his promotions, Walker danced in UNLV’s fine-arts program from 2009-14, he said. During that time, professor Victoria Dale invited him and a handful of other students to attend the International Association of Blacks in Dance (IABD) Conference, a dance service organization that promotes dance of African ancestry.

Dale, who has been teaching for and danced on Broadway and in films such as “The Wiz” (1978) and “The Blues Brothers” (1980), said she recalls Walker telling her that the conference changed his life because he hadn’t seen African-American dance companies that were on par with other popular ones, such as Alvin Ailey. So Walker decided to expose his arts center students to such experiences as well.

“It’s sort of like a legacy, because I see him embrace what I have exposed him to, and then he’s giving it out again (to his students). It makes an instructor feel rich when that happens,” Dale said. “He is carrying the torch.”

Walker said he has wanted to be a choreographer since high school. While at UNLV, he participated in a guest lecture by Bernard H. Gaddis, founder and artistic director of the West Dance Theater formally known as the Las Vegas Contemporary Dance Theater. Walker kept in contact until Gaddis invited him to be an apprentice with the company for about two years, then a member, he said. From there, Walker joined the cast of Donn Arden’s “Jubilee” at Bally’s Las Vegas.

He now performs in “Vegas! The Show” five nights a week. He also is featured as a guest jazz dance instructor at Las Vegas Academy of the Arts, where he graduated high school. He said that his training from the arts center, LVA, UNLV and the Contemporary Dance Theater prepared him for the jobs on the Strip. Walker added that his mentorship is aimed at giving students skills they need to succeed in any job.

“What I tell the kids often is, ‘Whatever you’re going to do, just commit to it,’” he said. “Too often dancers get very lost, and it is hard when you want to do so much and you only have a short amount of time to do it. Whatever you do, live in that and commit.”

Contact Kailyn Brown at kbrown@viewnews.com or 702-387-5233. Follow @kailynhype on Twitter.