Teresa Tomb's career path has taken a sharp turn since the days when she worked at Central Apothecary, a pharmacy formerly located on the campus of Central Baptist Hospital. Though she had studied pre-pharmacy at the University of Kentucky, Tomb has long dabbled in various artistic endeavors - serving as music choreographer for her high school drill team, taking theater classes at UK, and singing in a few local bands here and there. Eventually she realized that even though she liked the pharmacy direction just fine, it didn't give her the same excitement that she got from her creative endeavors.
"I just had too much creative itch," said Tomb. "Most of my motivation and drive went in a creative direction, and the more I became active in dance and music, it just seemed natural, like this was the way I was supposed to be going."
For the past 10 years, Tomb has been able to devote motivation and drive into artistic endeavors full-time. As the owner and co-founder of the cultural dance center and studio Mecca, Tomb teaches dance classes throughout the week and performs regularly with the Rakadu Gypsy Dance, a tribal-style belly dance troupe that she also co-founded. She recalls that one of her earliest formative encounters with dance in Lexington was through a theater class at UK with Rhea Lehman.
"Her class opened up a creative awareness in me that connected many pieces of paths I was casually exploring, like musical improvisation, movement and performance art," Tomb explained. "I found a certain confidence in it - a confidence in the moment."
Soon, Tomb began taking various cultural dance classes around Lexington, including flamenco, African dance and belly dance. Because there were no actual cultural dance studios in Lexington at the time, these classes were held at places like Artsplace, where the former dance company Syncopated, Inc., was based, and the YMCA, where Tomb studied belly dancing with Suzanne Armetta in the 1990s. After Armetta passed away unexpectedly, many of her students (including Tomb) were left saddened and stunned, with no clear direction for the creative outlet they wanted to continue.
"We didn't want to stop dancing," Tomb said. "Rakadu was born out of that group of students."
Rakadu Gypsy Dance is based out of Mecca, which Tomb and Lisa Duggins founded in 2000. (Duggins has since left the operation to pursue a different career.) In addition to its focus on unusual, outside-the-box dance styles, Mecca is distinct from other dance studios, locally and elsewhere, in that it encourages people of all body types, ages and skill levels to take classes. From the start, Tomb wanted Mecca to provide an alternative to the notion that in order to succeed in dance, you have to start as a young child.
"It's very rare that I get somebody that comes in and already has a dance background," she said of her students.
Tomb, an active member of the March Madness Marching Band, has spent much of her creative energy encouraging creative expression through movement among crowds that aren't necessarily predisposed to dance, from people with various mobility issues, to teenagers and community members who have never danced before. In 2009, the Thriller Halloween Parade, the annual downtown reenactment of the dance from Michael Jackson's Thriller music video, initiated by Tomb and Mecca early in the decade, brought out the zombie dancers in 500 or so diverse community members (not to mention a record-breaking crowd of an estimated 8,000 spectators). Tomb and company are also the organizing force behind the annual Mardi Gras community parade and received the 2006 Urban Innovation Award from the Downtown Lexington Corporation for their work on these events.
A longtime collaborator with community facilitator Bruce Burris of Latitude Artist Community, Tomb has also devoted hundreds of volunteer hours teaching and encouraging artistic expression among populations considered to have disabilities, through initiatives such as the Theater of Possibilities Camp, Minds Wide Open and the Very Special Arts Camp at the Lexington Children's Museum. In her perspective, the benefits and joys from movement and dance aren't about technical skill but instead are about opening up a permission within yourself to explore new capabilities.
"Anything that we want to try, we are the people standing in our own way a lot of time," she said.