Dance Outreach Gives the Disabled a Leg Up : Ballerina, Recovering From Hip Surgery, Boosts Students’ Self-Esteem

Zina Bethune grabbed her leg, stretched it, then touched it to her forehead. It is a stretch that dancers do every day. But for Bethune it is a miracle.

Once an actress on television’s “The Nurses” and “Love of Life” and a soloist with the New York City Ballet, 35-year-old Bethune hopes to continue her dancing even though she is recovering from double hip surgery and has two metal hip balls and sockets.

“One of my kids always looks at me and says, ‘You’re metal,’ ” Bethune says with a smile.

Bethune’s “kids” number more than 400. They are students who participate in Dance Outreach, a nonprofit program that uses dance to encourage self-esteem among learning and physically disabled children from six Los Angeles area schools. The program also encourages artistic interaction with able-bodied children, says Bethune, who founded the program in 1982.

Dance Outreach is supported by continuing grants from the California Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, which gave it $35,000 this year, and by private donations and fund-raising events.

One such event will take place at 6 p.m. Sunday, when Bethune’s company, the Bethune Ballet, presents “Dreams Come True” at the Palace Theater, 1735 N. Vine St., a gala that will include appearances by, among others, Joan Collins, Lana Turner, Sid Caesar and Gregory Harrison. Turner will be presented with a special “Spirit of Life” award for her continued support of Dance Outreach, and the evening will also include appearances by four Dance Outreach students.

Bethune says her motivation for starting the program grew out of her personal struggle to satisfy her “obsession for dance.” She has continued to dance despite scoliosis, a curvature of spine; lymphedema, a disease of the lymph glands that impedes circulation of body fluids, causing swelling of the legs; plantar neuroma, a tumorous growth in the feet that often troubles dancers, and, finally, displastic hips, a condition in which the full-grown femur bones cannot fit into undeveloped hip sockets.

“Displastic hips are more common in German shepherds,” says Bethune, who has undergone four highly experimental operations to correct the condition. Two were performed in Denmark by hip specialist Dr. Eivind Thomasen in 1970.

Bethune says the femur was separated and rotated so it would fit into the socket and, at the same time, would give her the extension a dancer requires. The operation, a first for a professional dancer, left her slue-footed but “able to dance,” she says.

In 1983, after dancing for 12 years (six more than Thomasen had hoped for), Bethune’s hips gave out. By then, Thomasen had retired from surgery. Bethune, who says she had talked to 54 surgeons who had given her no hope before she found Thomasen, instigated a new search for a surgeon and an experimental, non-cement attached prosthetic that would allow her to continue dancing.

Her two-year search ended when she met Dr. Charles Engh of the Naval Hospital in Arlington, Va. He had just begun using a new technique to attach prostheses. Because of Bethune’s special demands, he agreed to let Thomasen collaborate in the design to create a “dancer’s prosthesis.”

The revolutionary surgery was performed by attaching the steel prosthesis directly to the bone. Prior to the surgeries in 1983 and 1984--Bethune, who is still waiting to see if she will be able to dance again--began working with disabled children because “art has transcended my limitations,” she says, “why wouldn’t it add to their lives?”

Dancers must deal with “various levels of inability versus ability. Teaching and working with the disabled is the same process,” says Bethune, who first offered her program to the Washington School in Redondo Beach and 17 of its orthopedically disabled students.

Bethune says she immediately faced some problems, among them conquering the fear new students brought to the program. To solve that dilemma, Bethune insisted that the students’ regular teachers attend the sessions to convey a feeling of well being. Another problem was finding good dance teachers who didn’t dissolve into tears when working with the disabled, she adds.

“We are not there to make professional dancers out of these kids,” Bethune says. “By comparison to teaching dancers, it’s a slow, frustrating, painstaking process.”

Her regular staff of four teachers and three guest teachers work in teams at various schools, including the Lowman Development Center for the Handicapped in North Hollywood, where most students are confined to wheelchairs, and the Kit Carson School for the Learning Disabled in Hawthorne. The team approach allows the teachers to give more personal attention to the students, says Bethune, and it also gives the teachers an opportunity to bounce ideas off each other if things aren’t going well.

No matter how well the curriculum is planned, Bethune says, changes must always be made because the challenges are endless.

Working with the hearing impaired, for instance, she discovered that many instruments touted for their effectiveness didn’t perform well. Experimenting with other devices, she has has discovered the vibrational effects of balloons which “capture the rhythm and the melody.”

With the visually impaired, she has introduced emotions by using different textures. “ ‘Happy’ was a little difficult until I found confetti. It gives a feeling of bouncing in the air,” she says.

She introduces ballet and modern dance to the learning disabled by using popular dances like breaking, but tries to keep that dance form away from the orthopedically disabled “because there is always a danger of injury with them. There is a cautiousness and awareness that you must have,” Bethune adds. She and her staff try to hide those feelings because “it would overshadow the positive aspects of what we’re doing. My main thrust is ‘Let’s get out there and do it.’ ”

Problems Minimal, Joys Great

During the three years that the program has been active, Bethune feels the problems have been minimal compared to the joys. One of the biggest thrills was the day that the television show “Hour Magazine” came to film the children dancing.

“There was a little girl, Maria Pena, who had been with us about eight months,” Bethune remembers. “Maria had cerebral palsy and was always slumped over in her chair. Nothing they did got Maria’s attention.”

That day Bethune picked up a tambourine and beat out a rhythm. “Suddenly Maria looked up, sat up, clapped her hands in time to the music and smiled . . . and danced,” Bethune recalls. “ ‘Hour Magazine’ didn’t know what was going on. ‘Oh, a kid sat up and clapped.’ But to us it was extraordinary.”

(For information about Sunday’s gala: (213) 874-0481.)