The Dance Palace, Point Reyes Station’s longstanding community hub, has chosen Claire Duplantier Burns, the nonprofit’s arts and education coordinator, to serve as its executive director, the organization announced last week.
“She knows the older generation who built the Dance Palace, and she knows the younger generation who will carry it into the future,” said Barbara Jay, the board president. “It’s a wonderful fit.”
Ms. Burns, 45, will take the reins in March, succeeding Steve Siegel, 74, who has led the Dance Palace for nearly a year as an interim director following the departure of Bonnie Guttman after a seven-year tenure. Mr. Siegel provided steady leadership during a rocky period, Ms. Jay said, rebuilding trust within the community and setting the stage for a more inclusive, forward-thinking organization.
In choosing a leader for the Dance Palace, the board decided to forgo a typical search and instead unanimously selected Ms. Burns, who brings what Mr. Siegel described as a “bottom-up awareness of how things work.”
Ms. Burns grew up an hour north of New Orleans, in Abita Springs, La.—a town similar in size to Point Reyes Station. It was an enclave that drew an influx of artists, including her father, a filmmaker, and her mother, a puppeteer who ran a traveling troupe performing folkloric puppet shows. It was in those performances that Ms. Burns first took the stage. “The smell of hot glue is very nostalgic,” she said with a laugh.
She went on to study dance at Naropa University before earning a master’s degree in performance studies from New York University. Between college and graduate school, she moved to San Francisco and began performing Butoh, an avant-garde form of dance theater that arose in the wake of wartime devastation in Japan and is marked by raw, elemental movements and performers covered in ghostly white body paint.
Ms. Burns is no stranger to the rigors of running an arts nonprofit. Before moving to Inverness Park in 2021 with her husband, Sean Burns, a writer and professor, and their two sons, she co-founded Subterranean Arthouse, an interdisciplinary community art space in Berkeley that, before it closed in 2017, hosted concerts, dance performances and theater events.
Ms. Burns, whom Ms. Jay describes as someone with “intelligence, heart and a passion for the arts and this community,” has held two positions at the Dance Palace since she started in 2022—arts and education coordinator and previously performing arts coordinator. In the time between, she left the organization for four months, returning around the same time Mr. Siegel took the helm.
Now, as she looks toward the future of the Dance Palace, Ms. Burns feels a wave of optimism.
“There are so many people interested in seeing the Dance Palace thrive, and there is this great feeling of possibility about what this place can become,” she said. “When people tell me, ‘It feels just like old times,’ I take it as a compliment. It signals a vibrancy, a spontaneity, and a community that’s truly showing up.”
Founded in 1971 by seven young artists seeking a creative haven, the Dance Palace quickly became a cornerstone of West Marin’s counterculture movement. In the early days, the organization operated out of a modest space on main street in the Emporium Building, where a free-spirited ethos ruled. “There was a lot of dancing, singing, and taking off our clothes,” recalled Lisa Doron, who has been involved with the Dance Palace since its inception. “It was a place of creation.”
But over time, the organization evolved from its bohemian roots into a structured nonprofit. “We created this organization out of wildness, and then eventually it had to become a business,” Ms. Doron said. “But when the warmth wasn’t being nurtured in the same way, we couldn’t, for whatever reason, get it back. I think we were waiting for Claire.”
In recent months, the Dance Palace has begun to reclaim its founding spirit—what existed before it moved to its B Street location in 1989 and formalized its offerings. “We’ve been getting feedback that it’s like it used to be,” Mr. Siegel said. “But I’m much more interested in the future, and Claire embodies that future.”
Under the leadership of Mr. Siegel and Ms. Burns, the organization has introduced initiatives like a curated concert series, where local musicians craft an evening of performances. Such community-driven programming is a cornerstone of Ms. Burns’s vision for the future.
“The curated concert series is a model that really excites me,” she said. “It’s about giving the community complete creative control, from inception to performance—less top-down curating, and more bottom-up.”