Mission Statement

Small Fry Dance Club’s mission is to instill a love of dance in children, their family, and their community. Each dancer will be challenged to strengthen their body awareness, spatial awareness, flexibility, balance, creativity, movement technique, and appreciation of the performing and creative arts. We want dancers to crave movement for physical fitness, artistic outlet, and even emotional comfort. Our goal is to provide age-appropriate movement classes and performance opportunities for toddlers, preschoolers, and school age children. No matter the degree of each child’s dance goals, discovering movement should be nothing but empowering. Dance starts here!

Small Fry Dance Club – Dance Starts Here

Small Fry Dance Club was founded in 2007 by husband and wife team, Jana & Carlos Chapeton. The program started solely as an on-site extra curricular program in a small number of Bay Area preschools. After a few years the program grew in size and we started to see demand for public classes. 

In 2010 we took a leap and rented a dance space on the weekends. The weekend classes took off in popularity and we soon had wait lists. In 2011 we made a bigger leap and opened our own dance studio in Foster City, Ca. It was a great location that was perfectly suited for our preschool age dance classes. It allowed us to grow the program and we were able to make better decisions on the direction we wanted it to move in. Unfortunately, with our lease expiring and the shopping center we were in closing, it was time to find a new home. 

After an exhaustive search we finally moved to our current location in San Mateo, Ca. It’s a gorgeous 6000 square foot space with four dance studios. The additional space allowed us to expand beyond just preschool age dancers to all ages. The new location allowed to add the Principal Art program (www.principalarts.com) and combined both programs now span teaching kids as young as 18 month up to 18 years!

As of the writing of this page we have taught over 7000 dancers, at over 20 locations in the Bay Area. We would not have gotten to where we are today without our amazing families, dancers, and staff. It’s been amazing watching our dancers grow with us. Some started with us at the young age of 2 in Small Fry classes, and are now magnificent dancers in our Principal Arts program. If you are considering joining our dance family, we are happy to have you! Come grow with us.