"Dancing A Dream"
by Scott Andrews
Unique ballet program
opens up the world of elite dance
to local high school students
When Kelly O'Donnell, a Portland High School senior, and Marit Wilson, a junior, pack up their books and bolt out the door an hour before the final bell rings every afternoon, they're not cutting classes or shortchanging their education.
The two athletic young women are literally dancing their way through high school continuing their formal education at a higher level than the Portland school department can offer. Along with a dozen other fellow PHS students, O'Donnell and Wilson spend three hours every afternoon in a mirrored classroom a mile up Forest Avenue, performing pirouettes, practicing plies and dancing en pointe at Portland School of Ballet.
But unlike the ballet school's 115 other students, the 14 PHS dancers have reached an advanced level of expertise, and their 15 hours per week of intensive training in classical and modern techniques officially counts as part of their formal academic education and graduation requirements. These elite students are part of C.O.R.P.S., a remarkable partnership between Portland High School and the Portland School of Ballet that offers pre-professional training in dance that reaches far beyond the scope of traditional secondary education and offers southern Mainers a chance at performing careers that were hitherto unlikely or even unimaginable.
The acronym C.O.R.P.S. stands for "Collaboration, Outreach, Recognition, Performance and Scholarship," and it references corps de ballet, a French phrase for ballet ensemble. Port City's C.O.R.P.S. is a regional performing arts plus academic program that encompasses all of southern Maine. Students from outside the city need their home district's approval to attend Portland High School tuition free, but this is easily obtained through official channels. O'Donnell, for example, comes from Cumberland. Most of C.O.R.P.S. graduates go on to further study in dance. Some chose to continue with a performing company, where they typically enter as apprentices and then must work their way up through the ranks to become principal dancers and prima ballerinas. Others chose college, a track that typically precludes a performing career but opens other personal and professional opportunities.
O'Donnell hopes to join a dance company after she graduates in a couple of months, but she's uncertain whether she prefers ballet or some other discipline. "I want to dance every day," O'Donnell says. "I definitely want to pursue dance, but I'm not sure what style. I'm kind of open to options."
Wilson is still weighing her choices. She'd love to perform, but knows that the odds of big-time success on stage are slim. "If you make it, it's great, but unless you're famous it's really, really tough," Wilson explains. "If you make it, you can say that you're doing what you love."
One C.O.R.P.S. graduate who's currently doing what he loves is Taurean Green, a 19-year-old African-American from Portland's Munjoy Hill neighborhood. Green joined the famed Dance Theatre of Harlem a year ago, and he's been traveling and performing with the company as one of its apprentices.
Green started ballet nine years ago through a full-scholarship program that aims to introduce Portland minority and disadvantaged children to classical dance. He wowed Portland School of Ballet founder Eugenia O'Brien at an audition at the Jack Elementary School, and he excelled from the get-go. C.O.R.P.S. was the natural choice when Green entered high school, and that decision eventually led to Dance Theatre of Harlem, which is now his dream job. "I love it," Green says. "I get paid to see the world. I get paid to do what I love: dancing."
Small, dynamic and unique
C.O.R.P.S. is one facet of Portland Ballet, a small but dynamic institution that has created its own unique niche on Maine's arts scene over the past two decades. It began as the Portland School of Ballet in 1980, founded by O'Brien, a graduate of the Boston Conservatory of Music with a B.F.A. in Dance.
O'Brien's passion for teaching and reaching others provides the emotional and artistic horsepower behind her numerous dance enterprises, which are incorporated as non-profit arts organizations.
"Portland Ballet is steeped in education," says O'Brien. "It is the sole purpose that drives everything. We want to create a reverence and an understanding of a very challenging art form."
Portland Ballet Company, a semi-professional production ensemble, was added in 1985; it presents "The Victorian Nutcracker" every December and gives other public performances each spring and fall. This spring's production is a work of original choreography about coming of age titled "Dream Birds." It is based on an American Indian tale and involves the use of American Sign Language.
"Performing is part of education," adds O'Brien. "You learn how to perform. As much as somebody may have talent, they still need to be guided in how to make that talent more available to others through performance opportunities."
In addition to public dance productions, Portland Ballet initiates a variety of interesting and innovative performance opportunities that go beyond traditional ballet-school recitals and student showcases. Portland Ballet visits area elementary and middle schools using a lecture-demonstration format that usually involves one dance instructor with several C.O.R.P.S. performers. Schoolchildren are invited to participate in the demonstrations and to observe selections from the company's large repertory. These in-school appearances are chances to promote the understanding of ballet as an art form, plus they provide a bridge for the involvement of young dancers.
"By being a non-profit arts organization, our desire to give back to the community is very real," O'Brien explains. "We create as many situations as we can where we're going into schools, where we're performing for the community, where we're really offering opportunities for people to say, 'You know, I really enjoyed that.'"
City Dance, the scholarship program that helped launch Green's career, is an outgrowth of Portland Ballet's in-school outreach efforts. City Dance is funded by movie and television actress Victoria Rowell of "The Young and the Restless" fame. Rowell, who was born in Portland, cites her childhood ballet training as a major milestone in her personal success story. The actress returned to the Port City as a celebrity guest in a 1990 Portland Ballet production and she funded City Dance to help minority and disadvantaged children take their first steps in ballet training.
Green's mother, Paula Voltz, is thankful that O'Brien's watchful eye and City Dance's scholarship opened up opportunities that her boy would never have otherwise seen. "My son was chosen, somebody cared enough about my kid to look inside and see what is really there," Voltz says. "This is a chance to show what he can do. Without these people my son wouldn't have a start in life."
Portland Ballet also reaches others who have been traditionally ignored or marginalized by mainstream arts organizations. O'Brien teaches classes for the Goodwill Lifeskills Program, which reaches mentally retarded adults. This six-week series brings participants to Portland Ballet's studios to learn about dance in an authentic setting. The program culminates with a studio showing for family and friends of the students.
A holistic approach
It is C.O.R.P.S. that most perfectly epitomizes O'Brien's core values of education and outreach. Its current enrollment of 14 includes freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors. Like O'Donnell and Wilson, most started pre-ballet training at a very young age, and joined C.O.R.P.S. around age 14, after demonstrating interest and commitment far beyond typical students.
"The majority start as recreational dancers," says O'Brien. "And then they start to realize that this could become a larger part of their life."
To be accepted into C.O.R.P.S., student must maintain good grades in academic subjects. Acceptance at a major summer dance program is also required; that stipulation is an official nod toward excluding personal favoritism from the selection process.
C.O.R.P.S. students are predominantly female. This year's lone boy is typical of male representation. C.O.R.P.S. participants are also invariably intelligent, curious and demonstrate a maturity that belies the fact that they're teenagers in high school. Over the years, C.O.R.P.S. students regularly make National Honor Society and one has been a Portland High School class president. "They are very bright," says O'Brien. "They are very physically coordinated and they are fabulous achievers in any aspect of their life."
C.O.R.P.S. requires a huge commitment in time plus an extraordinary degree of self-motivation, and an individual's participation precludes many other extra-curricular activities. "These dancers trundle home at 4:30 in the afternoon, hit the books, eat and fall over," explains O'Brien. "And to do that day after day, it takes a very powerfully driven student to add that to the daily regime."
The C.O.R.P.S. director is Daielma Santos, a diminutive and charismatic ballerina from Brazil who exudes a contagious enthusiasm for teaching young people. A graduate of the Royal Academy of Dancing in London, Santos has extensive study in the Russian ballet method from the College of Fine Arts at Western Michigan University. She holds a B.A. degree in psychology from the Instituto Metodista de Ensino Superior in Sao Paulo, Brazil, along with a post-graduate degree in child psychology. In addition to directing C.O.R.P.S., Santos serves as Portland Ballet Company's resident choreographer and one of its principal dancers.
Each afternoon Santos energetically leads two hours of technique class: Teaching and demonstrating dance movements, then darting among the rows of her leaping, pirouetting students, offering assistance, fixing problems and giving positive critique to each. Throughout the two hours, Santos motivates all 14 with spirited nonstop banter that is delivered in an animated, articulate and heavily-accented English.
Encouraging her students to think independently and creatively is always central to Santos' message. "If you want to be a dancer, it's not just about going to the barre and doing pliés, and get your leg higher and spin more," she lectures. "I believe that a dancer has to think and have a curious mind to be a complete performer, a complete person. As a teacher I believe that it's my responsibility to give you not the knowledge but to make you a person who seeks the knowledge."
The third hour each afternoon is devoted to academic and analytic aspects of dance. The history of ballet is surveyed, from its origins in the French royal court of Catherine de Medici during the Renaissance to the art form's modern flowering under George Balanchine, Mikel Fokine and other masters of 20th-century technique.
Technical and medical subjects and injury prevention are the focus of classes in movement analysis, anatomy and kinesiology. Doctors from Orthopedic Associates conduct some of these sessions. Besides ballet, jazz dance, modern dance and yoga are also among the list of techniques covered in the C.O.R.P.S. program. A variety of corollary artistic facets are examined under choreography, acting and mime and musical score analysis. Production values include introductions to scenery, costumes, lighting and staging. There's even an intensive session on stage makeup.
Seniors are expected to pull all these skills together by choreographing a five-minute piece of original work, complete with all production values specified. From a formal educational standpoint, C.O.R.P.S. dancers are awarded transcript credit toward graduation in health, physical education, and fine arts through this demanding and innovative curriculum.
Santos and O'Brien frequently bring in outside experts to supplement Portland Ballet's own faculty of five. Often these guest teachers are nationally recognized dancers and choreographers with prestigious companies. Sometimes these artists conduct C.O.R.P.S. classes while visiting the city to set choreography or dance in Portland Ballet Company productions. Guest artist/teachers have included Gabriella Komleva of the Kirov Ballet Company, Anna Marie Holmes of Boston Ballet and Eleanor D'Antuono of American Ballet Theatre.
"We do not assume that we know it all," says O'Brien. "I think it's much stronger for our school to bring in people from the outside. It gives us two advantages. We as a faculty get feedback from them on our strengths and weaknesses, and we expose the dancers here to that professional level people making their life's earnings as dancers. Bringing people from the outside only strengthens our ability to get each dancer to know what the dance world is."
Looking back from the perspective of one year as a working professional with Dance Theatre of Harlem, Green explains that C.O.R.P.S. is simply a step on the ladder of success. "I think that it prepares you to on to another professional training program," says Green. "It prepares you to go on to the next level."
Although dance technique forms the nuts-and-bolts core of Portland School of Ballet's curriculum, Santos and O'Brien strive to stay focused on the bigger picture as well because they understand that not all their students will become professional performers and those that do so will benefit from wider-ranging perspectives.
"My philosophy of C.O.R.P.S. is that they learn technique, yes, but they also have a general understanding and knowledge of the dance," says Santos. "They have a chance to have a broad experience at different levels and different styles." O'Brien adds: "There's a more holistic approach to our teaching. There is more than creating a bun-head dancer. We want nice people, and we want people who understand that they're part of the community."
Reaching out
Late this March, Portland Ballet's spring production reaches out to a community that's seldom served by traditional dance companies: the deaf. "Dream Birds," an original piece choreographed by Santos, is based on a Native American story that is expressed via classical ballet movements augmented with American Sign Language.
"Dream Birds" was premiered by Portland Ballet in 1998, and Santos is revising it to suit the 14 dancers in the 2003 C.O.R.P.S. program. She's drawing on experts from the Baxter School for the Deaf to assist in crafting the 40-minute piece and help her students understand the idiom of sign language.
The cast compromises one teenage boy and 13 others. "Dream Birds" is an upbeat and uplifting story of affirmation. It tells a story of a headstrong, stubborn boy who yearns to be a great hunter and brave warrior but cannot accept the wisdom of his elders during the coming-of-age process. When his grandmother advises him to learn from the Dream Birds, magical and powerful creatures that inhabit the spiritual world, the boy rejects his grandmother's counsel and insists on pushing ahead on his own by pursuing an arrogant and false personal direction.
When originally presented, Green danced the role of the overconfident boy who struggles to find himself in all the wrong places. Santo explains: "It's all about trying and frustration and trying again and more frustration until he actually realizes at the end that the gift of the Dream Birds is inside himself."
Santos acknowledges that the take-home message from "Dream Birds" is remarkably similar to her own mission and style of teaching core values to C.O.R.P.S. students. As Santos explains, "The boy discovers, I'm not going to look for the knowledge elsewhere; 'I have to find it inside me.'"
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