Michelle Jarvis

Michelle Jarvis can't remember a time that dance wasn't part of her life. She started dancing around 5 and vividly remembers seeing "Swan Lake" and performances by Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn when she was a little girl.

She recalls the Bolshoi Ballet coming through Detroit, where she grew up, and getting to participate in the production. She was 10 or 11.

"Dance was always my life, always my ambition, always where I was going," the chairman of the Dance Department says. Her training was classically based, but there were supplementary classes in character, tap and Spanish dancing. ("I've played the castanets for a real long time," she says.) When it came time for college, Jarvis chose Butler, which it allowed her to indulge her two passions: dance and education.

"It became very clear to me somewhere along the line that education was important as well," she says. "That it was important to be a whole person. That dance, yes, was a whole entity, but that's not all that there was to living and to life."

After earning a B.A. in dance, she left for Millikin University, where she worked as a one-person shop. She taught the steps, made the costumes, rented the sets - even performed. Jarvis returned to Butler for her master's, teaching and dancing with Dance Kaleidoscope and the Indianapolis Ballet while she studied.

In 1986, she joined the Butler faculty. "I have continued to flourish and develop courses and programs. I've enjoyed working with the students who have come through." She became head of the Dance Department in August 2003.

In the little free time she has, she's enjoyed taking classes in steel art. "What I absolutely loved doing was welding. Learned to weld and create and put pieces of metal together into shapes and designs."

Jarvis is married to Jeff Maess, the general manager of the Indianapolis Philharmonic Orchestra. They have no children or pets.

"But I have sort of 100 children," she says with a smile. "I see them very frequently."