Berest Dance Center, the family-run studio that has taught Port Washington to dance since 1976, turns 50 this year, and it is throwing the kind of party five decades earns. On Sunday, August 30, the studio hosts its Golden Jubilee gala at the Jeanne Rimsky Theater at Landmark on Main Street, preceded by an alumni cocktail reunion down the street at Tuscanini.

The studio Olga built

Olga Berest opened her studio in 1976 and still directs it today at 12 South Washington Street, where the faculty now teaches the children and grandchildren of its earliest students. It is the kind of place where a mother points at a barre and tells her daughter that she stood at it too.

It stayed in the family in the most literal way. Olga's daughter Heather Berest spent 15 years dancing internationally with the Paul Taylor Dance Company and Momix before coming home, and she has served as the studio's artistic director since 2006. That pipeline, from a Main Street storefront studio to some of the most demanding stages in modern dance and back again, is the resume very few local studios anywhere can claim.

What happens on August 30

The celebration runs in two parts. From 4 to 5:30 p.m., former students, alumni and longtime members of the Berest community gather for a cocktail reunion at Tuscanini in Port Washington. The Golden Jubilee gala follows from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Jeanne Rimsky Theater, with a dressy chic dress code and a program built around the people the studio produced.

Professional alumni returning to perform include Darcy McLoughlin, Mikayla McKee, Maggie Golder, Julie Patilis, Elena Sundick and Ioanna Ioannides, joined by the Alison Cook Beatty Dance company as guest artists. Comedian and singer Warren Schein, a longtime friend of the founder, hosts the evening. It closes the only way a dance school's 50th birthday should: a full kick line of teachers and alumni spanning five decades, with the audience invited into a final toast.

Tickets for the gala, or for the gala and reunion together, are available through the studio's website. Sponsorship packages support Dance for Joy, the studio's outreach program, and include gala and cocktail tickets at the higher tiers.

Why 50 years of one studio is a bigger deal than it sounds

Dance studios are a famously hard business. Leases climb, enrollment swings, and main street studios come and go. Holding one village for 50 years under one family means something structural: the studio stopped being a business that sells classes and became part of how the town raises its kids. The alumni list doing the performing on August 30 is the proof, and so is the fact that many of the parents dropping students off on South Washington Street this fall took their own first steps in the same rooms.

For anyone who ever wore out a pair of slippers there, the reunion is the point. Fifty years of recitals scatter people across the country, and the studio is spending its birthday pulling them back to the same few blocks for an evening. If that is you or someone in your family, the details and tickets are on the studio's site, and August 30 is the date to hold.