Longtime Enfield Dance Teacher to Receive Lifetime Achievement Award

ENFIELD, CT — A longtime dance school owner who has spent more than four decades entertaining and teaching in Enfield and western Massachusetts has been selected for a prestigious honor.

David Potter will receive the "Lifetime Achievement Award" by the Massachusetts Critics Circle in a ceremony at the Majestic Theater in West Springfield, Mass. next June.

"I am very surprised and grateful for this honor!" Potter expressed on his Facebook page. "Local musical theatre was like I had a "second career" going on at the same time...I was always a dance teacher, first and foremost!"

Potter's involvement in musical theatre began in 1970 with a production at Bay Path Junior College (now Bay Path University) in neighboring Longmeadow, Mass.

"I was the co-choreographer and chorus member of the very first musical at the college, "The Boyfriend." I was only 19 years old," he recalled. "Over those early years, I worked with numerous theatre groups as a choreographer, onstage performer and later a combination director/choreographer, which was very unusual for our region. I really enjoyed watching and working with all those talented directors and singer/actors in the productions...I learned a lot."

Potter later founded two theatrical companies, Callboard Theatre and the Dance Theatre Company, providing original choreography and musical staging. He also spent several years working with Enfield Youth Services on their summer productions.

Among the dozens of shows he worked on were such classics as "Funny Girl," "Guys and Dolls," "Fiddler On the Roof," "Cabaret," "Godspell" and "Peter Pan."

"I was in community theater for so long, people said I was like the (Six Degrees of) "Kevin Bacon" of theatre in western Massachusetts and northern Connecticut!" he quipped.

Photos courtesy of David Potter