If your dance instructor asked you to move like the color red, stare like an owl or walk like your brother, would you feel nervous? Embarrassed? Inhibited?

“See, that’s one of my big things,” said Karen Montanaro, dancer, mime and movement instructor. “Movement is about you, and any way you move is right. My issue as a teacher is how to get around elements of resistance.”

For the last three weeks, Montanaro has been offering ballet classes to advanced students at Thomas School of Dance in Bangor. On Sunday, March 18, she will expand her lessons to the community with introductory performance and ballet technique workshops. The master classes are split into two ages groups: 8 to 11, and 12 and older. But Montanaro said the opening half-hour demonstration is open to everyone.

Trained in classical ballet, Montanaro says her goals may be less to get students to act like yellow than to put them in touch with their body as it moves through space. Sometimes, she uses a basic mime exercise called “fixed point,” in which each person makes a fist, holds it in space and then moves around it.

“When people finally get it, it’s magical,” said Montanaro. “Teenagers are self-conscious. So this kind of exercise is not that scary. But it’s very threatening for teenagers to start moving. Put them in a dark room, with maybe something to drink, and they’ll move. But to be under fluorescent lights with their peers, and they shrink.”

Montanaro began her own ballet studies in western Massachusetts and Portland. By 18, she was dancing professionally. By 27, she was looking for a new challenge and decided to go to medical school. But before she applied, the Portland Ballet Company asked her to dance the Sugarplum Fairy role in “The Nutcracker,” and it changed her life. That’s when she met Tony Montanaro, one of the great mime artists of the 20th century. He was cast as Drosselmeyer.

“I saw him in a performance. He was out of shape. He was recently divorced and going through an identity crisis,” said Montanaro. “But when I saw him perform that first gesture, I said: ‘I am going to become his student. This is it.’ Time stopped for me. The second time we were ever in the same room, he asked me to marry him.”

Ten months later, she did. The two started working together around the clock, onstage and in real life – and continued to do so until Tony Montanaro died in 2002. Since then, Karen has been performing internationally and teaching in schools.

“My 15 years of being married to Tony were like an incubation,” she said. “He infused me with what he knew. I was being injected with his knowledge. Tony taught me that I have a direct connection to inspiration and to trust that connection. The biggest thing is that he got me in love with improvisation.”

Improvisation, she said, was basic to an understanding of the technique she now shares with students throughout the state and on her travels elsewhere. Her mission is to “get students moving and discovering through movement.”

Turns out that moving like a color or walking like an animal can stretch more than the imagination.

Karen Montanaro will offer dance and mime workshops for ages 8-11 and 12 and older, 1-3:30 p.m. Sunday, March 18, at the Thomas School of Dance. The cost is $15 per person. For information, call 945-3457.