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SHE'S NOW 44 AND WAS MISS ALABAMA IN 1993

When Kalyn Chapman James dances, she feels free. She stands among a room filled with women and stretches her long-sculpted arms on the wooden bar. She plants her feet into first position and asks the other women to do the same. The room is dimly lit, but seems brighter with two walls of mirrors and accents of hot pink paint. She’s teaching a ballet barre class.

“Dance is something that I was always naturally good at and I enjoyed,” said Chapman James, a 44-year-old mother of two tween-age daughters. “For me, dance was really a way to change my life.”

Chapman James was studying at Loyola University in New Orleans at age 19 when she turned to professional dancing. For a year, she danced for a Dick Tracy show in Orlando, until she suffered a knee injury. She went back to her home state of Alabama and attended the University of South Alabama, joining the dance team after a friend recommended doing beauty pageants for scholarship money.

“In that system, talent is worth 40 percent of your score,” Chapman James said. “I had to maintain my body and my dance ability and training in order to be a viable competitor.”

She won Miss Alabama in 1993.

When her pageant life ended, she studied tap, jazz, ballet and hip-hop at the Broadway Dance Theater in New York and the Millennium Dance Center in Los Angeles.

For a few years, she taught dance while working full time for HealthSouth in Birmingham. Nearly a decade after winning Miss Alabama, she had her first child, moved to South Beach for her then-fiancé’s new job, along with their 8-month old daughter, Phoenix, and got married in Key West.

“Like most moms, especially like most first-time moms, I was overwhelmed by that responsibility and learning so much about parenting that I didn’t have a lot of time to stay in shape,” Chapman James said.

Within a year, she discovered the 6th Street Dance Studio and signed up for a pomo funk class, a combination of funk and hip hop dance. She did so well the instructor asked her to take over.

Dance became her life again. She starred in an Old Navy commercial about Bermuda shorts, danced for Sabado Gigante, the Spanish-language variety show, and performed at music award shows, while raising her daughter and balancing her marriage.

Soon after, she began teaching dance classes for Arts for Learning, a non-profit organization that teaches the arts in under-served areas of Miami-Dade.

“I loved doing that because of my community involvement when I was Miss Alabama,” Chapman James said. Then, in 2006, she got pregnant with her second daughter, Zen, now 8, and joined Arts for Learning’s communications team.

For the last four years, she’s been teaching the ballet barre classes at IronFlower Fitness in Miami’s Upper East Side, in addition to her full-time job as the corporate sponsor coordinator at the Adrianne Arsht Center and her part-time gig hosting art loft, a PBS program showcasing talent in South Florida.

“Now what motivates me is making sure that my children see me being active, eating well, being active in my community and making fitness part of my lifestyle,” she said. “I always like them to see me active and I like to do those things with them so it becomes a part of the way we bond.”