Walnut Hill's Elizabeth Rising - head of dance department at Walnut Hill Boarding School for Arts and Academics, Natick, Massachusetts, Elizabeth Rising - Abstract

Dance Magazine, Jan, 1999 by Marian Horosko

"We have high expectations, high standards, and excellent teaching," says Elizabeth Rising, head of the dance department at Walnut Hill since 1985, "and we take into account each student's individuality. I'm glad we do not produce an already defined dancer when he or she walks into our studios. We celebrate and expand their differentness."

Walnut Hill Boarding School for Arts and Academics in Natick, Massachusetts, was begun in 1893 as an academic school for girls. The peace and quiet, the dedication to high achievement at Walnut Hill are as sturdy as the beautiful trees planted, along with a penny with the date of each graduating class, throughout the 45-acre grounds. Living spaces, five dance studios, a small theater, an art gallery, and twenty-one new sound-proofed music practice rooms are housed in Victorian-to-Californian modern architecture. Music wafts over the lawns, and student visual art makes a delightful appearance in unexpected places. These high school students are released from a do-or-die atmosphere by sharing their goals and absorbing the surrounding beauty.

Sydelle Gomberg, founding dean at Walnut Hill, 1978-1985, who left to become director of the Boston Ballet School, still maintains her status as WH's resident master teacher and adviser.

Rising, who joined the faculty in 1978, remembers her own beginnings when she faces fourteen-year-old eighth graders at the school's nationwide auditions: "I lived in Amherst and my world was limited to creative dance classes. Then, when I was about fourteen years old, my family moved to England, where I discovered ballet. It was a fascinating mystery until I learned that it had a method and a system. I took classes at the Bush/Davies School, where we quaked in Maureen Bush's classes and said `thank you, Miss Bush' whether we were right or wrong. Then I went to the Cone/Ripman school, which was affiliated with the London Festival Ballet, where we studied six days a week from early morning until 6:00 or 7:00 at night. It was a three-year course that included Cecchetti and Royal Academy of Dancing exams."

Eventually, Rising received her training and diploma at the Arts Educational School in London, associate qualification from the Royal Academy of Dancing, and from the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dance (national and Cecchetti).

The teaching style at WH is termed eclectic and may be described as including a stance that places the weight well forward with an elongated spine, a subtle use of the head, cambre that comes from the upper back, epaulement, use of the metatarsals on the floor, and a strong focus on musicality. Faculty members meet frequently to decide upon class material, and students study with more than one teacher.

"Getting students to listen is hard," Rising says. "They are so concentrated on other things and there is so much noise in their world I think they block out a great deal and don't really hear any more. It's hard to impress students with the fact that flashy steps are trendy and will disappear if there isn't a good foundation from which to develop and accomplish whatever will be required of them in the future. Quality and beauty are not often recognized as important in their world. In this country, we often train our dancers from the waist down and hope for the best above the center. Our WH training is something appreciated later. Former students write me acknowledging the fact that they didn't understand at the time, but that now they know the value of having learned the basics.

"So I know the feeling that many of our students may have, coming from a limited background. They have limited expectations, as well, until we expose them to a system and different kinds of dance by going frequently to Boston to see professional companies of every kind so that they may expand their dreams. They are naturally drawn to the kind of dance appropriate to them and they find their own way--a way that might be entirely different from the path they originally had envisioned.

"An adolescent's life is more complex than ever before because of the onslaught of available information, the diversity of choices, and all of it arriving faster. It's a great demand on young people who are sensitive and delicate at this school age. We try to keep them from leaning emotionally on us; yet we have to be aware of the changing aspects that they are encountering. It is a reward of confidence when they meet our challenges by surviving, growing, and gaining strength to meet the future."

Stephanie Bonnell Perrin has been head of the Walnut Hill school since 1984. WH is one of three independent residential schools in the United States that combine academics and intensive arts training--Interlochen in Michigan and Idyllwild in California are the other two. The school's comprehensive college preparatory program was founded as academic preparation for Wellesley College, with music, theater, dance, creative writing, and visual arts added in 1971. Perrin administrates for the school's 220 students and 40 teachers. One of her concerns is the importance of identity: "You're not a ninth- or tenth-grader here; you're a dancer. That's your identity, instead of feeling like a weirdo in the adolescent years when there is so much pressure to conform. Young people today are expected to excel academically and otherwise. It's easy to understand why they might look for shortcuts and have a do-it-yourself attitude that might creep into the process. Their emphasis on getting a job when they leave here is different from ours. Our mission is to prepare the student for the real world which may or may not accept them as dancers so that they may meet the challenge of a career or whatever happens to them at a later time.