Article by Hannah Olson

Photos by Arianna Skoog 

Long before generations of Billings children learned to point their toes, find their place at the barre or step onto a stage under Betty Loos’ watchful eye, she was a little girl in Laurel who saw a sign for dance lessons and decided she wanted to do all of it. “I signed up for ballet, baton twirling, hula dancing, acrobatics, dance,” Betty remembers. She was eight or nine. Eventually, ballet became the thing that stayed. More than seven decades later, so has Betty. 

For more than 60 years, she has been a fixture in Billings dance, teaching generations of children, helping build the School of Classical Ballet, creating performance opportunities, and forging a partnership with the Billings Symphony that has let local children perform The Nutcracker alongside professional dancers and live musicians for decades. 

But Betty’s legacy is hard to measure in years or productions. It lives in the opportunities she helped create in a city where, when she began, many of them simply did not exist. 

Leaving to Learn, Coming Home to Teach 

As Betty grew more serious about ballet, she began traveling from Laurel to Billings for training. After graduating from Laurel High School in 1961, she left Montana to study dance at the University of Utah. “I didn't get to finish there because I couldn't afford it,” she says. So Betty came home. 

It could have been where dance became something she used to do. Instead, she answered a newspaper advertisement from a man looking for someone he could train to teach ballroom dancing. Betty thought, “Oh, well, that'll be fun.” 

When he discovered her dance experience, ballroom expanded to ballet, tap, and acrobatics. Eventually, Betty began teaching on her own wherever she could find space, including part of a duplex where she installed ballet barres. There was no grand institution yet. There were borrowed rooms, a handful of students and a young woman who kept teaching. 

By the early 1970s, Betty was helping lead what would become the School of Classical Ballet alongside the late Jana Stockton. She still has their very first recital program from 1972, which she typed herself. 

Never Finished Learning 

Betty may not have finished her degree in Utah, but she never stopped learning. For years, summers away from teaching became chances to be a student again. She traveled across the country and into Canada for intensive training, studying ballet and modern dance, anatomy, nutrition, strength, choreography and how to teach dancers well. Her studies also took her to Europe, including Italy and Prague. 

In Canada, she took part in programs that brought together teachers from around the world. “You had teachers from all the different countries, so it was like an international group,” she says. “You'd hear what was going on in these other countries.” That became the pattern of her career: go learn something, then bring it back to Billings. 

She also taught at what was then Eastern Montana College, where one jazz class unexpectedly attracted football players who discovered that taking dance got them out of a mandatory study hall. “You all dance like you're playing football,” she remembers telling them as they instinctively clustered together like a huddle. Dance became one of the ways she connected people to movement, art, discipline, and one another.

Building a Place to Belong 

The School of Classical Ballet survived because people repeatedly chose to keep it alive. For years, it operated at the YWCA. When the school needed to leave, plans for another location suddenly fell through. “Do we just close the school?” Betty remembers wondering. “Because where do we go?” 

That is where Julia Marble-Blass stepped in. Julia bought a former garage on Daniels Street and, in a remarkably short time, transformed it into Montana Dance Center, a permanent home where the School of Classical Ballet could continue and grow. The building was renovated with dancers in mind, including sprung floors, mirrors and studios. For Betty, Julia’s willingness to take that leap saved more than a location. “So we were able to continue the school,” Betty says. Without Julia, she isn’t sure it would still be here. 

Today, 56 years after it began, the School of Classical Ballet is owned by Julia and co-directed by Betty. With 19 teachers, it offers Billings dancers something Betty once had to leave Montana to find: serious training and meaningful performance opportunities close to home. 

Over the years, Betty helped establish performing companies and choreographed story ballets, including Cinderella, Coppélia and Swan Lake. Her philosophy has always been rooted in developing children, not only dancers. “Do something that's age appropriate for them,” she says of choreographing for young dancers. On the pressure for children to look older through makeup and styling, she is equally direct: “They're beautiful. They don't need all of that.” 

Now 83, Betty is still in the studio, still teaching and still shaping the dance community that grew up around her. 

A Billings Holiday Tradition 

Perhaps nowhere is Betty's impact more visible than in The Nutcracker. The local tradition began in 1979, when Betty was approached about involving Billings children in a production with the Billings Symphony. She and one of her former teachers prepared the young dancers, starting a tradition that has carried on through different presenting organizations, visiting companies, and generations of local children. 

San Diego Ballet eventually became a longtime professional partner. Its production gave local dancers room to grow through The Nutcracker, eventually dancing substantial choreography alongside professionals. “To me that was a real plus,” Betty says, especially “for the older kids to have those kinds of opportunities.” 

She remembers one talented local dancer standing toward the back during an audition, seemingly unnoticed by the visiting professionals. Finally, Betty spoke up. “Did you notice her back there?” They hadn't. Once they did, they couldn't believe they had missed her. It is a small moment in six decades of teaching, but perhaps one of the best explanations of Betty's legacy. She notices the ones in the back. 

More Than a Performance 

For Betty, The Nutcracker has never been just the holiday tradition audiences see from their seats. “The experience of dancing with a professional company with live music by the symphony, that's pretty special,” she says. 

The School of Classical Ballet has since added its own Nutcracker, creating more roles for local dancers while still partnering with San Diego Ballet’s production. It is another chapter in a story Betty has never considered finished. 

The Legacy in the Room 

Ask Betty about six decades of teaching, and she doesn't begin with productions or accomplishments. She talks about the kids. “I learn a lot from the kids too, but they become kind of like family,” she says.

Spend enough years teaching children, and time circles back. Students grow up, start families, and some return through the studio doors with children of their own. Betty has also learned when to make room, handing classes to talented teachers who come to Billings so the next generation can learn from them. 

That, too, is legacy: not holding tightly to everything you built, but creating something strong enough to continue without you at the center of it. 

Betty didn't build Billings' dance community alone. Jana Stockton built the school alongside her for decades, Julia Marble-Blass made sure it survived into a new chapter, and countless teachers, dancers, families, and community partners have carried the work forward. But Betty has been there for so much of it: teaching in borrowed rooms, traveling to learn, choreographing, rehearsing and watching generations grow up. And noticing the dancer standing in the back. 

Betty once had to leave Montana to find the opportunities she wanted as a young dancer. When she came home, she spent the next six decades making sure the children who came after her wouldn't have to. She brought dance home, and then she gave Billings a place for it to stay. 

Originally printed in the November 2026 issue of Simply Local Magazine

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