FREEPORT, Armstrong County — Alex Isenberg began July by searching for a Los Angeles apartment.

The 2010 Freeport High School graduate will be bicoastal for a few months while he explores dance and acting opportunities in California.

“It’s the next step in where I want to go with the whole dance career,” Isenberg said.

But it’s a career Isenberg never dreamed of.

Isenberg, 24, began his quest to dance professionally nearly two years ago. While he has focused on jobs in New York City, he now wants to turn his attention to Los Angeles.

And, while he’s had success in New York, Isenberg said he wants to branch out and tackle a “new beast.”

Isenberg grew up around dance.

His mother, Lisa, owns the Lisa Marie School of Dance in Freeport. Alex danced competitively as a child, winning his first national contest at the age of 4.

Although he danced throughout his childhood and teen years, sports soon became Isenberg’s main interest.

Sitting in an empty practice room at the studio, the walls covered with pictures of dance groups, including several of him as a child, Isenberg talked about sandwiching dance competitions between basketball, football and baseball games.

“It was a good balance of the two that I enjoyed,” he said.

After graduating from Freeport High School, Isenberg went to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where he was a pre-med major and played football.

One weekend in 2011 on a trip home, Isenberg tagged along with his mother to a dance convention in Pittsburgh.

At lunch that day he was approached by an instructor who had seen him dancing in the back of the room during a workshop. The instructor asked Isenberg who he danced for. Isenberg said he was just a college student.

“‘You should be auditioning, you should be dancing,”’ Isenberg recalled the instructor saying.

Isenberg said that conversation “sparked a fire” in him.

Soon after, he transferred to Allegheny College in Meadville, where he could play football and also dance.

As he was about to return for his senior year of college, Isenberg told his parents, Lisa and Ike Isenberg, he wanted to drop out and pursue a dance career.

“At first, I especially wanted him to finish college because he had so few credits left,” Lisa Isenberg said.

But, as a dance instructor, Lisa Isenberg knew Alex didn’t have the luxury of time.

“Timing is everything in that career,” she said. “We said, ‘OK, let’s give it a shot.’”

It took Isenberg just four months to book his first “big gig,” he said, an appearance in a Madonna workout DVD called “Addicted to Sweat.”

Since then, he has performed with Coco and the Vanity Vixens, a New York City burlesque show; the Broadway Bares, a show aimed at raising money for charities; and he has traveled to Japan with Danzzz Dreams, a Japanese reality show.

Isenberg also performed in a “Magic Mike XXL” promotional spot on “Good Morning America” with Channing Tatum, who, Isenberg said, took the time to sit and talk with the dancers and learn their names.

Isenberg’s early childhood was marked by surgeries, as well as dance lessons. Born with a cleft lip and palette, Isenberg had numerous surgeries, the first of which when he was 10 weeks old, according to Lisa Isenberg.

Later, Isenberg underwent surgery to correct his flat feet and had both ankles reconstructed, operations that left him confined for a time to a wheelchair.

But both Alex and Lisa Isenberg credit those early surgeries for giving Alex an appreciation for what he has accomplished.

Isenberg said the surgeries helped him to “be thankful for all your gifts.”

Lisa Isenberg echoed that sentiment.

“I think he’s the person he is because he had to spend time in a wheelchair,” Lisa Isenberg said. “It makes you appreciate where you are and what you can do.”

Isenberg hopes to expand his artistry in Los Angeles and thinks it will afford him a greater opportunity for success. He hopes to move into commercial or sitcom work.

“It’s a new adventure,” Isenberg said of his relocation to Los Angeles. “I’m always excited to try something new.”