Community involvement - community dance programs - includes suggestions on starting such programs

Dance Magazine, May, 1996 by Marian Horosko

Every dance professional recognizes the importance of cultivating future audiences and discovering new talent. Although community projects to further these goals are no longer a new idea, federal and state grants are not as readily available for development of these objectives as they were in the 1980s. Whatever the size of your city or studio, through new resources you can recruit and educate potential dancers, invite academic teachers into joint programs and develop your audience through community involvement.

Here is a description of how three groups--Boston Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, and the Henry Street Settlement--are successfully meeting that artistic and financial challenge.

Boston Ballet's Citydance

Citydance, a pioneer project launched by Boston Ballet's artistic director Bruce Marks in 1990, is designed to discover dance talent in the program's eighty participating public schools in Boston and Lynn, Massachusetts. Each year Citydance staff members audition eight-year-olds and give scholarships to more than two hundred students who demonstrate aptitude and ability. These youngsters enter a twelve-week course of weekly ballet classes at the Boston Ballet studios. A federal grant pays for busing from the public schools during school hours, and shoes and leotards are donated by Capezio/Ballet Makers. Funding comes from local corporations. Students audition, then complete the twelve-week introductory course, a six-week follow-up, and the summer program. About twenty are then ready to enroll in the regular program at a fairly fast pace.

"We're involved in dance education," says Marks, "and dance training is only one part of that. From the time our first Citydance youngsters appeared in Nutcracker, our audience began to change. Pride was revealed. The audience was a racial mix. It's one thing to say everyone is welcome or to do a program that reflects racial elements; it's another thing to include different races in your productions. Ballet has to be relevant and reflect the times. How does it look? From a choice of thousands of children, we have found the right bodies, talent, and minds.

"We don't want to do an intensive program for just a few or to give many just a smattering of training. What we do is teach a way of thinking about art that is joyous and supportive. With this kind of exposure to all facets of our theater art, we promote an audience and find talent, but also develop creative artists in related disciplines through exposure to dance. I know there are people out there who believe that social welfare is not part of what we should be doing, and we should just be making ballets. But that's not the real world. There's no one out there looking out for our future in dance. We have to do it."

Boston's project is large. How do you start on a small scale? "Once you want to do it," Marks says, "it happens. Start with volunteers."

Pacific Northwest Ballet's DanceChance and Bravo! Ballet

In PNB's program talented third- and fouth-graders from four (soon to expand to twelve) inner-city elementary schools attend biweekly, tuition-free classes at the PNB school. Through auditions, thirty-six out of two hundred fifty screened were chosen to study in 1994, beginning with a six-week training course with all expenses paid. PNB supplied the wardrobe. From that group, seventeen were accepted and awarded scholarships for twenty additional weeks of classes. After two years in DanceChance, this group may then be assimilated into the regular dance school on scholarships.

Jonathan Watts, director of DanceChance tells us that "sensitivity is the key to success with these children. Behavioral problems are the biggest deterrent to progress. A child may be talented, but if there are behavioral problems, talent is lost. Discipline begins at home. It's an enormous disappointment when we have to take a child out of the program."

DanceChance departs from other programs by first teaching ethnic folk dances that are easily accessible (there is, for instance, a large Asian population). Thus, they create a frame of reference to music and movement before the more disciplined work of ballet training begins.

"You think that nothing is happening and the students don't understand anything you've said," says Watts. "But all of a sudden--I don't know why it happens like this--but everything suddenly clicks. And there they are, quiet, following instructions, and inspiring me to further efforts. Then, at their next class, all hell breaks out once more."

Bravo! Ballet opened its doors to fourth- and fifth-graders in 1992 and has since racked up an audience of 6,000 each year. This program offers attendance at PNB performances in the Opera House for $3.50 a ticket; free, all-day teacher workshops; and student trips to PNB studios to watch company dancers in rehearsal. Before the performance there is a studio field trip that includes a class with faculty member Kabby Mitchell, formerly a member of Dance Theatre of Harlem and PNB. "In twenty years of teaching," Mitchell says, "my most rewarding experience was a class for homeless children. They argued and fought so much, I had to regroup. It was a calamity. I didn't even ask them to take off coats or shoes. But by the end of class, even though they were still arguing, they were arguing over [at] what count they should put out their hands!"