Lessons learned at Alice Arts Center: art and politics don't mix at new arts-based charter school - Young dancer

Dance Magazine, Feb, 2003 by Chiori Santiago

It was midday, early last year, and Oakland's Alice Arts Center was quiet. A few voices rose and fell in the hallways; a telephone rang; the elevator chugged slowly. On the third floor, sunlight fell onto the wooden boards of an empty dance studio. The place seemed to wait for the 4:00 p.m. onslaught, when public classes start and the hallways swell with children piling in to practice capoeira or tap, or to try a new solo with the Oaktown Jazz Workshop.

That picture has changed since the Oakland School for the Arts opened at the center on September 4, 2002. The college-preparatory program offers a four-year, high school education in six "specialties": arts management, dance, literary studies, music, theater, and visual arts. OSA's dance program seems a perfect way to take advantage of precious studio space lying fallow during the day at "the Alice," as Oaklanders call the city-run building. The spacious studios are lonely no longer: From morning until late afternoon, they're filled with leotard-clad teenagers practicing plies for dance instructor Dave Williams. Two floors below, the remaining 102 first-year students move between classrooms built with $1.4 million in city funds.

Oakland's latest charter school could be a model for other public arts schools interested in sharing space with dance centers. But there is a cautionary tale here. The road to OSA may have been paved with good intentions, but an explosive mix of art and city politics quickly dropped the project into a sinkhole filled with facility issues and misunderstanding, delaying the school's opening for a full year and alienating a part of the arts community.

The Alice Arts Center has a national reputation as a center for music and performance, particularly those forms derived from African traditions. City-subsidized rent and a downtown location have made it a haven for ten nonprofit enterprises, including AXIS Dance Company, Diamano Coura West African Dance Company, Dimensions Dance Theater, and Oakland Ballet.

The idea for OSA began with Oakland's colorful mayor, Jerry Brown, who saw it as a counterpoint to a controversial military charter school launched a year earlier with his support. As a California public charter school, OSA is tuition free and can serve students from outside the district. Some 400 applicants from across the country applied for 120 slots in the school's inaugural ninth-grade class. Of them, sixteen are dance majors. Brown and the city's art commission oversee the school's governing board, which, even though it includes Board of Education members, is independent of the local unified school district. Brown also was responsible for hiring director Loni Berry, a musician, stage director, and faculty member of California State University, San Marcos.

"We offer students who want to study art in a focused way a place to do that," Berry explains. "Ours is a conservatory-style school. All academic subjects are taught through the arts. It's a different kind of program; it's not like a traditional high school at all. We don't have a marching band. We will not have a prom. We are coming from a conservative point of view in terms of discipline. The days are long, from 8:30 A.M. until 6:00 P.M. most nights. There are uniforms. You can't cut class. If you do, you won't participate. If you don't meet the standards, you won't perform, and you must have a 3.0 grade point average to perform."

According to Berry, the school's site committee considered several other sites before zeroing in on the Alice. The match seemed perfect. Unlike the other spaces, the Alice offered existing arts facilities, pre-equipped with dance floors, barres, and dressing rooms. The basement, long used for storage, could be turned into soundproof practice rooms and classrooms.

Trouble was, no one informed the center's existing tenants. Denise Pate, director of an anchor tenant at the Alice, CitiCentre Dance Theatre, until July 2002, learned of OSA's impending arrival when she found a flyer announcing student auditions. About the same time, Carla Service, who heads a hip-hop dance program for teens, arrived at the center one day to find workers measuring her office as they prepared to move OSA administration into the space.

Alice Arts' tenants had complained about the facility's many physical problems--leaks, broken windows--to managers slow to respond. Yet suddenly, the city was promising vast site improvements, although for a school that happened to be the mayor's baby. The fact that the building manager, Taura Musgrove, was the person to file OSA's charter school application didn't help. Rumors flew that the building's longtime tenants--the very companies that established Oakland as a site for world dance--would be evicted to accommodate the school. A subsequent tenant meeting, says Berry, "turned into a brawl. We ended up having a one-year delay. I didn't think we were prepared."

By October 2002, the school was running smoothly, but Berry remains bruised by the experience. "We have absolutely no relationship with the Alice Arts Center," he declared from an office that occupies the center's second floor. Truce-building has been left up to OSA teachers and the tenants. Company members of Oakland Ballet now teach some classes to OSA dance majors. And the resident dance companies, at last, have leases in which the city ensures their use of the four existing studios after 4:00 P.M., when the students vacate the studios, finishing their day in the downstairs music room and classrooms.