Ballet amid the bullets in Iraq

In an airy studio lined with mirrors, little girls in pink leotards and boys in black shorts and white T-shirts pull themselves up as straight as they can and push their toes out into first position.

Their teacher, Ghada Taiyi, walks between them, straightening a pair of knobby knees and adjusting the curve of an arm. She switches on a cassette player, and the strains of a grand piano fill the room.

“You wouldn’t think we are in Iraq,” she says with a smile.

In a city full of bloodshed, the Baghdad School of Music and Ballet is an oasis, instilling in its young charges a love of music and dance in the midst of war.

“I feel happy when I come here,” 11-year-old Lisam says as she catches her breath between leaps and twirls in another of the school’s studios.

Through the worst of the violence, Iraq’s only performing arts school never stopped putting on shows and sending its teachers and students on cultural exchanges abroad.

But the school, one of the few places left in Baghdad where children of all ethnic and religious backgrounds learn together, cannot shield the students from the horrors beyond its heavily guarded gates. Bomb blasts and rocket barrages shook the capital in the few hours that the students were practicing demi-plies and ports de bras.

“Sometimes, we see people killed and kidnapped,” says Lisam, who doesn’t give her last name for safety reasons. “Sometimes we even worry about our parents, when they bring us here and pick us up.”

Lisam shares the same dreams as dance students anywhere in the world: “to be famous,” she says.

But unlike girls growing up in less turbulent countries, she practices excerpts from the great classical ballets in her stocking feet, so as not to wear out her precious point shoes before the end-of-year recital. There is no place to buy another pair in Baghdad.

Most of the ballet students drop out when they’re 12 or 13, Taiyi says, afraid of the Muslim extremists who consider music sacrilegious and kill for much less than dancing in public in a form-revealing tutu.

Each time a student stops showing up for class, staff members call the parents to ask why.

“They always say ‘security, security, security,’ ” says Taiyi, a slim woman with a commanding presence who is not afraid to wear a leotard in front of male visitors in her studio.

Taiyi says she cried for days when one particularly promising student disappeared without explanation.

Taiyi graduated from the state-run school in 1984 and went on to teach there. Now, she says, “I am afraid that we are going to lose the art of ballet itself.”

The school, which offers primary and secondary education, hasn’t graduated a ballet-major class since the mid-1990s, when Saddam Hussein began courting conservative tribal and religious leaders to shore up his rule.

Even if the students did complete their training, there are no opportunities for ballet dancers in Iraq. The only professional performances most of the children see are on the videos and DVDs in the school library.

The challenges are just as great for the music students. Most leave their violins and flutes at school to avoid attracting the attention of religious militias by carrying instrument cases in the street. That cuts into their practice time, making it difficult to progress, says Ahmed Saleem, who as the school’s technical director oversees music and dance education and the 42 arts teachers, many of them part-time staffers.

Saleem has moved six times to escape death threats, and he is not the only staff member to receive them. To avoid drawing attention, the school took down its sign two years ago.

It was not always like this. Art and culture have flourished in Iraq since the dawn of civilization. Even Hussein’s brutal regime patronized artists, musicians and dancers for the glory they could bring the country.

The music department, which offers instruction in both classical and Arab instruments, opened in 1968, part of a modernization drive that marked Hussein’s early years in power. The ballet section was added the following year.

Admission is by audition, and instruments and tuition are provided free. Academic lessons are held in the morning, and the afternoons are devoted to art.

Until the 1990s, Hussein’s government brought skilled professionals from the Soviet Union to teach the students, and imported instruments, music scores and ballet slippers by the crate-load. The training was rigorous, and the school’s graduates are found in orchestras and ballet schools around the world.

But the foreign teachers left when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 and never returned. As the economy buckled under the effects of United Nations-imposed sanctions, crucial supplies began running out.

Because of the school’s association with Hussein, angry mobs descended on it after the dictator’s fall in April 2003. What they could not carry away, they smashed to pieces. Even the grand piano was gashed with an ax.

But the next day, the teachers were back, sweeping away the debris so classes could begin again. The school now depends largely on donations from embassies, cultural institutions and arts lovers in Europe and the United States to equip its students.

Most of the school’s students have come from educated, middle-class families, which were among the first to flee the city’s descent into chaos after U.S.-led forces invaded five years ago. The number of students has dropped to about 150 from a peak of more than 400. Just 15 of them study ballet, and the department has had to fend off attempts by the Culture Ministry, which is controlled by Islamists, to shut it down altogether.

Nadja Hamadi, who has served as school principal for 20 years, insists these are temporary setbacks.

“Iraq is the cradle of culture. The first letters were written here. The first farming took place here. And the first law was drafted here,” she says. “These wars are only temporary things. We have to preserve our culture and start anew.”

Arecent drop in violence has provided much-needed encouragement.

Hadil Youssef, a woman veiled in black, risks bombs and gunfire every day to drive her two boys to school from Sadiya, still one of Baghdad’s most dangerous neighborhoods. Amer, 8, is learning to play a Middle Eastern lute called the oud, and 7-year-old Mujaid is studying ballet.

Youssef waits for them all day in the car park and drives them home in the afternoon. The police and soldiers on the streets have a habit of firing guns in the air to hustle the traffic along, and occasionally a stray bullet lands nearby. But that doesn’t deter the shoemaker’s wife from bringing her boys to school.

“I want a better future for them,” she says.

At the height of the sectarian killing, in December 2006, the school put on a Concert for Peace featuring the children’s orchestra and choir. The dance students performed an original ballet describing the violence that had engulfed Baghdad. It ended with a resurrection representing what they hoped would be their city’s emergence from the bloodshed.

“People said this school was finished,” says Saleem, the technical director. “We did this performance to show that they were wrong.”

alexandra.zavis@latimes.com