Renowned area dance teacher Theresa Landry dies at age 96
Operated Dexter Street dance studio for 63 years before 2014 retirement
PAWTUCKET – Theresa Landry, one of the most iconic dance teachers in Rhode Island, who educated generations of students from her Pawtucket dance studios, passed away on Thursday. She was 96.
A renowned dance teacher in the Blackstone Valley, with generations of students who came through her studio over the decades, Landry danced since she was a young girl.
Landry’s first dance studio was at the Leroy Theatre in Pawtucket, where she resided until she was asked to leave because she was told that the dancing was making too much of a racket for the neighboring theatergoers. After leaving the theater, she arrived at her studio at 100 Dexter St. which she had called home until December 2014, when the multi-story brick building was sold, to be converted into loft-style apartments.
Adorning the walls of her five-room dance studio prior to its closing were pictures of generations of students, as well as pictures of politicians,
celebrities, and dignitaries whom she met in the past, from Ted Kennedy and Dustin Hoffman to Johnny Carson and Liberace.
In the 1950s, Landry had her own television program in which she sold Buick motor vehicles. The show was aired on WNET-TV for a year, then WJAR-TV for approximately six months. Landry’s talents also took her to Expo 67 in Montreal and HemisFair ‘68 in San Antonio. Additionally, she toured the East Coast and much of New England in the 1960s for various USO shows, entertaining sailors throughout the country.
Kevin Doyle, a Barrington resident and one of Landry’s former students, said his former teacher was “someone that never lost their zest for life and adventure, someone who lived life to the fullest. Someone who was a bright, shining star for Rhode Island and just enlightened so many people’s lives.”
“There was so much more to Theresa than just being a dance teacher. You learned life lessons, she was just an inspiration to everyone around her,” Doyle said. “She always used a philosophy of her mother, she used that philosophy on me, she always told me I can do it and to go for it. She opened a lot of doors for me that led to a lot of great experiences to continue to dance.”
Doyle first attended classes at Landry’s studio when he was 10 years old. Now in his 60s, Doyle is a step-dancing and tap-dancing professional. In 2014, he received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts Award, the nation’s highest honor in folk and traditional arts.
“It’s so hard to do that woman justice after all these years. She’ll be missed,” Doyle said. “Now she’s really dancing with the stars.”
Landry was inducted into the Pawtucket Hall of Fame in 1994. Patricia Zacks, the chairwoman of the Pawtucket Hall of Fame Committee, described Landry as “a really neat lady, a real dynamo.”
“She would come to the awards banquets and she would always provide roses to all the inductees that were coming in that year. It was so very special and important to her. She was proud to be a Hall of Famer and wanted to make sure those new inductees shared the same pride,” Zacks said. “I remember it was a big deal for her to personally hand a rose to each inductee, she wanted them to feel welcome and proud to have made a positive impact on the city of Pawtucket.”
Zacks’ first interaction with Landry came when she was helping with the programming for the Pawtucket Arts Festival’s Slater Park Fall Festival.
“We brought her in that first year and she had all of her students come and I was most impressed to watch her navigate the crowds between people and her young students, arranging them on the stage and how she was so thrilled,” Zacks recalled. “I remember she was proud of her age, she was up there in years, and she loved her dance. She loved the city, she was proud to tell about how long she’d been dancing.”
“I remember being so very impressed with her enthu- siasm and determination,” Zacks added. “She was in no way retired, she was happy to kick her heels up and show how young she was. She was full of energy.”
Born in New Brunswick in Canada, Landry emigrated to the United States as a baby in a most peculiar way. Her father, fed up with farming, wanted to move to Maine to seek work in carpentry. However, immigration laws of the time permitted parents with only one child to emigrate from Canada to the United States and infant Theresa had an older sister.
To pass immigration, Landry’s mother rested her eldest daughter on her lap in the front of the truck and placed 1 ½-year-old Theresa in the bed of the truck, buried in potatoes with only her head not submerged in tubers. After crossing the border, the family settled in Maine for about a year before moving to Central Falls, where she was raised and lived most of her life.