On Their Toes for a Way Out

So when Katlego Ragoasha told his two grown-up brothers about a chance to learn ballet, the only father figures he had flatly said no.

Ballet is for girls. Boys play manly sports, like cricket. Ballet, they warned darkly, would turn him gay.

Of 6,000 disadvantaged black schoolchildren who tried out for an intensive dance class, Katlego was one of only 32 who had made the cut. He decided to ignore his brothers' advice.

"I wanted to prove to them that doing ballet didn't mean I was going to be gay," Katlego said.

The class is run by Martin Schonberg, artistic director of Ballet Theatre Afrikan in Johannesburg. Fifteen years ago, during the apartheid era, Schonberg recalls, someone at a dinner party told him that black people could not dance ballet.

Outraged at the remark, he embarked on a campaign to train more professional black ballet dancers in a country that then had none.

In a community center in this Johannesburg suburb, the children stretch toward greatness in their run stockings and beat-up ballet shoes. The afternoon sun pours through the high windows, and motes of dust dance on the sloping sunbeams.

It's a long way to this drab hall from the stage of the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, but Russian ballet master Alexey Ilin made the journey this year. Nothing shocks him about Alexandra's deprivation and its pockets of squalor; he sees only the children's effort, the tears shining in the eyes of the boys and girls as they push themselves through the painful stretches and splits.

"It's difficult. It hurts. You have to break your body," said Ilin, whom Schonberg hired to teach the class. "They have to bear that.

"But I said, 'It's necessary. You need that.' And they understand."

All of the children say the stretches are the hardest part.

"I think I'll never be able to do it," Katlego said. "Sometimes I feel like I want to cry, but I can't because the other children may laugh at me."

Thato Moloto, 8, wanted to cry too, but "Alexey explained to us that we were going to feel pain, so I decided I was not going to cry. Boys are not supposed to be cowards."

Ilin, 38, danced for 20 years professionally, performing solo leads and touring the world before he came to South Africa. He saw it as a wide-open country with endless opportunities to teach. "When you know a lot, you have to do something with that knowledge," he said. "You have to pass it on."

He turns up afternoons in an ancient Toyota, teaching the classes alongside local dancer Penny Thloloe, 24, who grew up in the township. He apologizes for his English and instead uses his hands to mold arms and bodies carefully into poses of grace and beauty. When the children do cry, he is proud, not disappointed.

"The most interesting thing is that when a boy cries, the others calm him down and help him," he said, noting how attitudes have changed since the class began in February.

"At the beginning, they fought and swore at each other," Ilin said.

Sometimes Ilin might prod a bottom poking out too far, but unlike the teachers at Alexandra schools, he never wields a stick or a rubber hose.