Waltraud Karkar - life and career of a dancer instructor at Central Wisconsin School of Ballet

Dance Magazine, Sept, 1998 by Paul Kennedy

Waltraud Karkar walks through a bright and airy studio of her Central Wisconsin School of Ballet in Wausau, past the group of little girls sitting on the floor, and stops to look out a window. Her students, who were giggling and fidgeting before Karkar's entrance, grow quiet. To make sure that they stay that way, Karkar turns to them and raises a finger to her lips. "Shush," she says, as a silence unfamiliar to children between the ages of three and five fills the studio. "You'll frighten them away."

The students are puzzled. Perfect. Madame Karkar knows that she has them, and their full attention. "Have you ever seen leaf fairies?" Karkar asks as she peers out the window. Her stuents, no bigger than pixies themselves, shake their heads. "No?" their teacher says in feigned wonder. "Don't you have any trees in your backyards? That's where the leaf fairies live. When you go home after lessons today look for them. You'll see."

The children, filled with curiosity, will do just that. They might not see the leaf fairies right away but they will discover something magical as they search. Of course, the magic is not of leaf fairies but of a teacher. Their teacher.

"How many people stumble through life not noticing the beauty that surrounds them?" Karkar asks while relaxing between classes on a sofa in a lounge at her school. "I like my students to walk down the street and notice the architecture, notice paintings, notice the little worm crawling on the sidewalk. When I talk of leaf fairies with my youngest students, what it does is make the child aware of nature, and nature is an important part of dance. Do leaf fairies really exist? Of course they do. You simply have to believe."

Uncompromising faith in the possibility of all things, perhaps just as much as faith in dance, is what Karkar has been teaching her students and her community for the past twenty-seven years. It is a philosophy that has served her well in establishing a school of artistic excellence in the most unlikely of locations--Wausau, population about 38,000, the largest city and cultural hub of Marathaon County, Wisconsin, better known for insurance, forestry, paper mills, and dairy farming than for the arts.

Born in Germany, Karkar began dancing at age nine at the Landestheater in Darmstadt. She moved to the United States when she was eighteen and studied at the Stone-Camryn School of Ballet in Chicago, the Maria Gorkin School of Ballet in Switzerland, and the Joffrey school in New York City. During six years of private lessons with Elvira Vecsey, ballerina and later ballet mistress of the Budapest Opera House, Karkar learned the Russian method, which she now teaches. She met Joan Lawson, a Royal Ballet teacher and renowned for her rehabilitation, who stayed with her for two weeks. Together they worked fourteen hours a day on anatomy. "Most of my career and studied were geared toward teaching," Karkar says. "All that I am doing is carrying on the tratition that my teachers taught me and simply passing them on to my students."

Karkar moved to Wausau with her husband, Jack, professor emeritus of business and economics at the University of Wisconsin, when she was in her late twenties, with four sons from a previous marriage and expecting a daughter with Jack. The Karkars intended to stay only a year or two. Now, nearly three decades later, Waltrud laughs at how this small community has grown on her and her family.

"Even though we weren't going to stay, I started giving a few lessons in our home because some people were interested in ballet. In order to have the proper space, we had to take out the dining-room wall. That meant we didn't have a dining room or a living room anymore, but we did have a beautiful space."

A few classes led to a modest, cramped school and eventually to a dignified and grand school with space for three studios with state-of-the-art flooring. The school's beauty and functionality (including a room for the certified Pilates therapist) would be the envy of any teacher. Three teachers form the permanent faculty, and guest teachers and choreographers arrive all year. Students number more than 200 from throughout the United States for ballet, yoga for adults, and a new jazz program, as well as a new daily ballet class for children aged ten and eleven. In addition to inviting companies to perform in an effort to broaden the artistic opportunities in the community, Karkar's summer program has become a showcase for world-renowned artists: Shamil Yagudin from the Bolshoi; Irina Kolpakova, former star and currently ballet mistress for American Ballet Theatre; Vladilen Semenov, former head of the Vaganova Ballet Academy; and Gabriela Komleva of the Kirov Ballet, to name a few. Her professional students have performed with the Bolshoi, Milwaukee, and Arizona Ballets, North Carolina DanceTheatre, and other professional companies. Working with city officials, Karkar helped renovate a neglected outdoor amphitheater in Wausau's Stewart Park) once used in the 1920s by local devotees of Isadora Duncan), and she pioneered an artist-in-schools program for more than twenty years that has brought dance to over 100,000 children in Wausau and surrounding communities.