Carmel Howarth
She was a tomboy with the soul of a dancer.
At primary school, Carmel Howarth loved wearing gumboots and running wild outdoors.
“I loved rugby but I wasn’t allowed to play because girls weren’t allowed – but I used to play rugby at school with the boys all the time,” she said. “Bullrush was another really cool one.”
But ballet classes were a different story. She never quite gelled with her classmates, who couldn’t relate to her rough-and-tumble ways, and gave up after two years, deciding it wasn’t for her.
Years later, when she was 14, a jazz ballet class at Tauwhare Hall caught her eye as she was biking past.
“I bowled in, asked what they were doing – because I’m not backward in coming forward – got some information and basically started the next week,” she said.
“I loved it. I basically never looked back. I didn’t realise that I had a flair for it. I was flexible, I could kick, and it was something that just really caught me. I’m not short and delicate and dainty and never have been, but I think a lot of dancers are muscular and strong, and that’s what dancers have to be.”
It was a watershed moment that led her to study jazz ballet to an advanced level and eventually start her own school, Dynamix Dance School. Wanting to make dance more accessible to rural children, she held her first classes at Roto-o-Rangi Hall and later moved them into town as her roll grew.
Now, after teaching jazz, hip hop and contemporary dance to local children for more than three decades, she is reluctantly retiring.
“It is heartbreaking, but I think it’s time now,” said the mum of three, who has needed surgery on her back, shoulder and knee since 2008.
“My kids and my husband have been wanting me to stop for a few years now because of my injuries and the reason I am injured is because I’ve just always gone out hard. It’s just one of those things.”
Carmel wrapped up her career on Saturday night with The Final Countdown, a concert for past and present dance families held at St Peter’s School.
Interviewed by The News the day before, she said her whole family would be dancing together for the first time, performing Bad Medicine.
She and her husband Steve had always been “big rock people”, she said.
Carmel Howarth (right) and her three daughters (from left) Nikita Howarth, Rhiannon Hudson and Astrid Joy dance together at Dynamix Dance School’s final concert on Saturday night. PHOTO: Maddie Shaw, MRS Photography.
Carmel taught all her daughters to dance. Rhiannon reached the top 15 in the New Zealand Association of Modern Dance hip hop finals in 2013, but Nikita and Astrid focused on sport. Nikita, who was born without hands, became New Zealand’s youngest Paralympian when she made her debut in swimming in London in 2012 and went on to win gold and bronze medals at the Rio di Janeiro Paralympic Games in 2016. Astrid played for Cambridge Football Club’s senior women’s 1st XI at age 13 and was selected to represent the Waikato/Bay of Plenty region.
Carmel felt one factor behind her children’s success had been “the morals I believe in and the person I hope people think I am, which is just being honest, being respectful, kind and treating others how you want to be treated”.
She said the thing she would miss most about teaching was interaction with children.
“A kid comes along when they’re five and you might still be teaching them 15 years later,” she said, finding it difficult to get the words out as tears welled up in her eyes.
“So you’re part of their life for such a long time. You see them grow up. And I’m part of that growing up. Because I think some of the dance values I instill in the kids – just normal things like respect and punctuality and kindness – is what makes them become who they are as well. If you are teaching them well, those kids end up basically doing that without even thinking.”
Decades after discovering her passion for dance at 14, she remains utterly besotted.
“Dance is a form of expression and it can be happy, it can be sad, you know, it’s just got so many facets,” she said.
“You can choreograph a dance and watch somebody dance it and it brings you to tears. Or, you can watch it and you go, that was just so cool, you know? If it’s danced properly – and by properly I mean with feeling – the audience is captured by that feeling and that’s what you want. You want the audience to feel your journey.”
Carmel plans to spend the next six months “just having some down time”.
“I’ll do some gardening, try and get better at a bit of golf,” she laughed.
She said giving up teaching would be very hard.
“It’s just been awesome getting to be a big part of the Cambridge community and getting to know so many lovely kids,” she said.
