AUBURN – Like a shaky formation of flamingos, the four dancers-to-be teetered in place.

Right feet tucked up against left legs. Arms spread wide. Faces red.

“Smile,” Mariah Perry coached her students. “It makes it look better.”

Grimaces surrendered to tense smiles.

“Did you feel that, ‘Oh, I could stay here forever’ feeling?” Perry asked.

Fifteen-year-old Natasha Johnson of Poland nodded. She stood again, resting her weight on her left foot and settled slightly.

“I’m not a dancer,” she said later. “I cheer, so that might help with this a little bit.”

She might become a dancer.

Or just maybe – as Perry hopes for all of her students – Johnson will become a singer who can dance.

“It’s very basic dance class for people who do not dance,” said Perry, who has been living and working part time in New York City since graduating in 2005 from Dean College in Franklin, Mass.

A singer who grew up in local musical theater productions, Perry didn’t dance until she went to college, where she studied for a career in theater.

No one knows how to dance for the stage unless they’ve been taught, she said. Few of the young people auditioning for roles in local musicals have dance backgrounds.

Those who do seem to skip musical theater for ballet, Perry said.

It’s an issue that became more acute when Community Little Theater decided to produce “Footloose” this summer.

Director Richard Martin worried that local feet might be a little too stiff. Perry offered up the class, tapping her college experience and her own post-graduate teaching in New York.

She took over a dilapidated classroom inside the Great Falls School, meeting with her students for six classes over two weeks. Most of them, ages 14 to 22, planned to try out for the production.

James Kramlick, 22, of Gray, planned to try out for the lead, he said.

Singing feels comfortable, he said. Dancing feels foreign.

He listened to Perry’s direction – “point your toes into the air” and “close your rib cage” and “take a breath” – and tried to make it all work as effortlessly as picking up a melody with his voice.

A few minutes later, his hands in the air, Kramlick worked at loosening up and swayed in Perry’s direction.

“I always think about it too much,” he said.