Boys Class
Centralia, WA is a small city of a little over 16,000 people located 90 miles from both Seattle and Portland, OR. Over the past years, the community has dealt with several hardships, including a devestating flood, the closing down of a local coal mine, and the highest unemployment in the state.
Centralia Ballet Academy opened in the fall of 2009. From the beginning, my wife and I decided that we would include a free boys class as part of our cirriculum. By the end of that first year, we had a total of 5 boys taking class each Saturday. By the end of our second, year, we had 18 boys. Currently, we have 25 boys and young men enrolled in our Saturday classes. Many of them also take at least one regular class throughout the week. We have three different level of classes for the guys. The first one is a regular ballet class for boys ages 8 and older who have taken at least one year of dance, another is a creative movement class for little guys ages 4-7, and the last one is a ballet class for first timers.
The class for the advanced guys builds on their regular dance vocabulary but also focuses on strength training and plyometrics to help improve their leaps and turns. The little guys class introduces them to movement, musicallity, and very basic dance vocabulary. Each week, there is a different theme for the class (pirates, The Beatles, science, the 1980′s, Johnny Cash, etc) and we use music and games around that theme. The class for the rookies is much like a basic Ballet 1 class with added emphasis on strength and endurance building. Each class concludes with watching a video clip of a famous male dancer. This is done to not only increase their cultural literacy, but to show them power, grace, and athletecism of the male dancer. I am really looking forward to choreographing their recital pieces this year. For the little guys, we will be doing “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World” from School House Rock. It’s a fun (an educational) song that can incorperate marching, galloping, and other basic dance steps. For the two older classes, they will be combining to do a ballet piece to Rush’s “Tom Sawyer”. Not only is this an awesome song, they lyrics really speak about that period of growing from a boy to a young man. Plus, one of our students is a championship fiddle player. So we will be replacing the guitar solo with one played live on the fiddle.
Billy Elliot WOrkshop
In addition to their regular classes, I also try to bring in special guest teachers to show the guys that what they learn in class can be applied to other endeavors. Over the past few years, we have brought in fencing and acrobatics teachers to do special workshops. Last year, we were lucky enough to have one of the cast members of the touring production of Billy Elliot visit our school and do a master class with our boys. Later that month, our guys got to see the show in Portland, and go back stage after the show to meet the cast, including the young man playing Billy. Not only was this the first proffesional production that many of them have ever seen, it was one that spoke directly to them.
Getting to teach these guys each Saturday is an honor and a blessing. What I truly love about these guys is how they are typical American boys. They start wrestling with each other as soon as they get in the studio. They are obssesed with video games and the Fast and Furious movies. Many of them play on their school’s basketball and football teams. We also have Boy Scouts and Cival Air Patrolmen. One of the best images I have about the boys in these classes is seeing some of them come in to class after an early morning of hunting. They change out of their camo and Carhart’s into their black tights and slippers and take an hour and 15 minutes of class. Then after class, they change back into their hunting clothes and head back into the woods.
My wife and I both came from towns smaller than Centralia. However, while she got to dance most of her life, the opportunity for me to take dance classes didn’t happen until after college. I had interest in trying dance, but was hindered by geography, economics, and just the common wisdom of the day that “boys don’t take ballet.”
