Ballet studio transports urban kids to another world
The Sugarplum Fairy, sweat glistening on her brow, performed the same sequence of steps over and over across the polished wood floor, looking by turns euphoric and miserable.
Sprawled next to the piano stretching their legs, the Garcia sisters watched and waited for their chance to dance.
The four girls, ages 6 to 15, make the long car trek each afternoon from their home in South Los Angeles to this tiny dance studio in Silver Lake. Their father, who works all night delivering newspapers, drives them and then waits through their two hours of class.
The City of Angels Ballet offers free classical ballet training, along with pink satin shoes and fabulous costumes, to hundreds of children from some of the city’s toughest neighborhoods. This year, the program received $10,000 from the Times Holiday Campaign, part of the Los Angeles Times Family Fund, and will use the money to do more outreach to public schools in poor neighborhoods.
For the students, the tiny studio is a portal to ballet’s magical world of princesses, French words and pink tights -- a place where hard work and endless repetition can transport body and soul into an unimagined realm.
“It takes my mind off things,” said Maria Garcia, 15. “It’s a passion.”
Her sister Marbella, 13, nodded, and the sisters smiled at each other as they rose for their turn to dance.
Outside, waiting parents beamed when asked about the program. “It makes me feel joy,” Angel Cabrera said of the sight of his 8-year-old daughter, Neida, dancing.
The company is the project of Mario Nugara, a former professional ballet dancer who 15 years ago embarked on a quixotic quest to create a not-for-profit ballet academy and company that would serve the children of South Los Angeles and the Eastside.
He decided to do it, he said, after touring dance schools around Los Angeles and noticing that “there were no children of color” among the young students.
“I thought, ‘Maybe that’s why I’m supposed to be here,’ ” said Nugara, who trained at the School of American Ballet in New York and has a master’s degree in fine arts from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. His partner, Nicholas Moss, who died of AIDS-related complications 12 years ago, supported him while he poured all his energy and extra money into the school.
Fifteen years later, the City of Angels, which has a professional company and offers performances, is not just a place to learn to dance.
“It is also about community and respect and dignity and manners . . . about these young people getting self-esteem, a good feeling of self-esteem,” Nugara said.
As the children swirled about him frowning and trying to get their steps right, Nugara pointed at one young woman. “She just moved here from El Salvador,” he said. Another child has a father serving in Iraq, and another shares a bedroom with her mother.
All of them, though, are subject to Nugara’s sharp corrections.
“Stand up, Jesus,” he said.
“This is center,” he said to a young woman who had spun too far to the right.
“Wait, wait till she bows,” he said to a third student.
And as his students smiled, another thing became clear: No matter what their lives are like, here, under the soft yellow light of the studio, all these dancers were, for a while anyway, princes and princesses.
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