Perry-Mansfield Performing Arts School & Camp

The story

In 1913, when Charlotte Perry and Portia Mansfield stepped off the stagecoach in Steamboat Springs and bought land up Strawberry Park, locals figured they’d lost their minds. Two Smith College women had moved to a dirt-road mountain valley to build an outdoor dance camp, instructing students to leap barefoot across wooden platforms built right into the aspen groves. The town called them "the mad ladies of Steamboat." They didn't care. They kept building log cabins, laying sprung dance floors in open-air barns, and inviting avant-garde choreographers to spend their summers teaching in the woods.

That stubborn experiment turned into the oldest continuously operating dance and theater camp in the United States. Over the next century, modern dance giants like Merce Cunningham, Agnes de Mille, Doris Humphrey, and José Limón spent summers here shaping new work far from New York boardrooms. A young Dustin Hoffman worked as a camper and camp counselor; Jessica Biel spent summers rehearsing on the same dirt paths. The grounds—placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1995—still look remarkably like they did a century ago, with rustic timber structures tucked under thick canopy.

When summer rolls around, the camp opens its doors for evening showcases, student dance premieres, and theater performances inside log-walled venues like the Julie Harris Theatre (named for the famed actress and former student). You walk past historic cabins, hear piano scales drift out through screened windows, and take a seat in a barn where modern American dance quietly remade itself.