FARMINGTON – A dance class changed the life of Margaret Gould Wescott.

In return, she’s changed the lives of students and others as she inspired them to freely move, create and perform through improvisational dance.

“She’s changed my life by making me believe in myself. The dance makes me stop and relax and see it’s OK to be silly or show emotion through dance,” said Fallon Nickelsen, a senior dance student at the University of Maine at Farmington. “She’s the best professor.”

That the class, as it is now constituted, will also end this semester is a big disappointment, said Nova Free, a University of Maine at Augusta student who comes to the Farmington campus twice a week for this class.

“There’s nothing like this in the state of Maine. She is the teacher I’ve been looking for,” Free said.

Wescott’s position as founder and teacher of the UMF Dancers’ class and dance company, along with the program itself, fell victim to the university’s December budget cuts.

“We were starting to plan a big 30-year reunion before the announcement,” Wescott said of the post-modern improvisational class she’s taught over the past 29 years.

Now Wescott, at 64, contemplates the next step in her life with enthusiasm, humor and wisdom. But she also admits to grieving the end of her job at UMF, a campus she came to love.

Still, other doors are starting to open, she said.

An athlete, Wescott majored in physical education in college but took a dance class during her senior year that changed her life.

“Dance is for all. Life restraints go away … and you can become a 5-year-old again,” she said. “Mind/body/spirit are all one word to me,” she said of the spiritual side of the dance.

In her 41 years of teaching, Wescott has not repeated the same lesson twice. Using wide-ranging subjects as themes for dance, humor and practicality, thousands of college students and local people have danced under her direction. Pastors, physicians, teachers are among those who danced in the company year after year.

“A football coach, Carl Rudman, from North Anson, was one. He was part of the company for 11 years; now he’s become a sought-after dancer himself,” Wescott said.

Wescott has shared dance through workshops and residency with 82 school systems across Maine from Fort Kent to Kittery. She believes in teaching subjects in an interdisciplinary style. Math, prime numbers, writing can all be taught through dance, she said.

Growing up on a Waterboro farm, Wescott excelled as an athlete and student. After a stint at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Wescott and her former husband and children returned to Maine.

She had a goal, and along with others, developed a K-12 dance curriculum for Maine making the state the seventh nationally to have one. It’s a teacher-friendly document with a practical plan for teaching a topic such as adverbs, for example, through dance, she said.

The UMF dancers will not perform a spring program as usual but instead are giving a few performances, including one Thursday at L’Ecole Francaise du Maine in South Freeport. The school’s founder, Elizabeth Choate LeBihan, was a UMF dancer.

Many of Wescott’s students have opened dance studios and teach dance, she said.

Her children, daughter Sarah, a psychologist in San Francisco, and Seth, an Olympic snowboarding medalist, also participated in the UMF dance company.