Gifted Burbank teen is dancing her way to an elite ballet school

Jason Coosner, owner and director of the Burbank Dance Academy, proposed a lofty proposition to one of his students and her parents: Let me work with your child, and I will get them into one of the most competitive dance schools in the United States.

That promise was made to dancer Chloe Crenshaw, 16, about a year and a half ago. She will be on her way to the Harid Conservatory Saturday, an elite ballet school in Boca Raton, Fla., that takes in a limited number of students each year.

Founded in 1987, the conservatory has been giving gifted high school-age dancers the opportunity to train with some of the best dance instructors tuition free, all thanks to the school’s benefactor and founder, Fred Lieberman.

“I promise you that if you stay with me, I will make sure that you get into a year-round program for professional ballet study,” Coosner said he told Crenshaw a few years ago. “Now, here we are. Here we are, a year and a half later and she’s going. Promise fulfilled.”

Ballet dancer Chloe Crenshaw and Burbank Dance Academy owner Jason Coosner. Crenshaw will be attending the HARID Conservatory in Florida.

(Roger Wilson / Burbank Leader)

Though Crenshaw will attend Harid Conservatory for the academic year, she is not guaranteed a spot at the school next fall. Because of the school’s ability to be selective about who it wants, Crenshaw will have to continue to prove to the faculty that she belongs there.

“I want to learn as much as I can from the teachers,” Crenshaw said. “A lot of them come from the Vaganova Ballet [Academy] in Russia, so I want to definitely learn as much as possible by the end of the year, because I don’t know if they’ll ask me to stay again for another year.”

Crenshaw, who recently returned from Florida after auditioning for the conservatory during its summer program, said that she and other dancers at the local dance academy were excited to hear the news from the school a few weeks ago.

Though she recognized that she would be enrolled at one of the top dance schools in the country, Crenshaw said she had some reservations about choosing dancing as a career.

“Obviously, this is an amazing opportunity, and I’d be crazy not to take it. But, then again, is dance the route I want to take?” she said. “That was the biggest decision for me, but, at this point, the best thing I can do is to take the opportunity to try to pursue dance because there’s only a short time frame where dance is attainable for me.”

Crenshaw has been serious about dancing since she was 9 years old after she and her family moved from Chicago. She was introduced to Coosner about four years ago, when the Burbank business was the Burbank School of Ballet.

Coosner, a South African native with a master’s degree in dance from Southern Methodist University and a bachelor’s degree in musical theater from Elon University, was brought in by the former school director four years ago to develop choreography for other students there.

However, Coosner saw something in Crenshaw and wanted to focus on his work with her.

“Chloe was really skinny, gangly, bucktoothed and kind of awkward,” Coosner said jokingly about Crenshaw. “But I saw something in her. It was from that point on that we really started working together and mentoring her and working with her to realize her dance dreams.”

When Coosner bought the dance school a year and a half ago, he renamed it the Burbank Dance Academy, brought in new teachers who had the same enthusiasm for dance that he had and made Crenshaw one of his top priorities.

“Crenshaw said when Coosner first joined the school, he implemented a more modern technique mixed with more commercial, or stage, dancing.

“[However], as he became more involved with the studio, classical ballet became more of the focus,” she added.

As the practice hours at Burbank Academy increased, her skill level in classical ballet and contemporary dance steadily grew as she worked with Coosner.

Though her fundamentals were sound, Coosner said it was his musical theater background that helped Crenshaw create her own “artistic voice” that distinguished her as an elite dancer.

“There’s an expectation of technical proficiency of certain skill sets that have to be in place when you go to a professional audition, but at the end of the day, the thing that’s going to set you apart is what you are going to bring to the table that’s uniquely your own,” he said.

“From a very young age, that’s what I start working with dancers on. Your artistic voice is something that’s fluid and changes over time with experience, but it’s about the dancer being able to identify that and how to let that organically come through in their performance without it being affected,” he added.

Crenshaw, who would have been enrolled at John Burroughs High School, has enrolled at Laurel Springs School, an online high school, to allow her to focus on her dancing.

Monday will be Crenshaw’s first day at Harid Conservatory, and the teen dancer said that she is nervous about being on the other side of the country and away from her parents. However, she said she is excited about this next chapter in her life and her dancing career.

“I just want to see what happens,” she said. “I’m excited to see what pans out over the next year and the year after that.”

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Anthony Clark Carpio, anthonyclark.carpio@latimes.com

Twitter: @acocarpio