Tutus and 4-H : Professional Dancers Struggle to Make Ballet School a Success in Ramona

The odds of finding dancers with the experience of Louis and Dana Montes de Oca in a small upland farm community are about the same as finding a Brahman bull grazing on the streets of San Diego.

They don’t do the Texas two-step, buck and wing or the Virginia reel. They’re not into clogging and schottisches. Their expertise lies in classical ballet. They once danced as soloists with the top dance companies in the country. Now they try to teach their own students in ballet and gymnastics classes--many of whom come from a farming background--the discipline and the same high standards that drove them to strive for perfection.

Here, the emphasis isn’t on getting ready for the next American Ballet Theatre auditions, as it was for Dana and Louis when they were young; the focus is on the classes, the rehearsals, conducted with the same rigorous application of the same dance techniques that make sophisticated audiences catch their breath.

Louis and Dana work with 85 students such as 13-year-old Christine Toth. Christine, a 4-H member, “discovered” ballet under the Montes de Ocas. Although she still raises cows, goats and sheep, now they are sold to pay for the four weekly ballet lessons she has come to crave.

“Ballet is her special interest,” Sharon Toth said of her daughter. Taking dance away from Christine, Toth said, would be her greatest punishment. “Her older sisters are almost as excited just to watch her practice. Most girls wanted to do that. You watch and sort of turn green.”

Some Ramona parents view the Montes de Ocas as a godsend. “When I met them it was like electric. You could see how good they are. What they have offered and are offering--I honestly don’t think you could get better in New York City,” said Joyce O’Steen, mother of ballerina Wendy Sue, age 12. “They are so rare.”

But teaching ballet in Marlboro Country is slightly less difficult than roller-skating in a buffalo herd. “It’s taken a good deal of single-handed torch-bearing,” Dana said. “Financially we had to take on a lot, rent auditoriums, buy costumes--all these things--without a real strong support group from the community.

“When we came here dance lessons were just something to keep the kids busy and off the street,” Dana said. “The idea that you could actually achieve something (through practice), or that it could become a career was a new idea.”

It was also an idea that did not jive with an existing program for the arts in Ramona.

For more than 15 years the Ramona Council of the Arts Unlimited has offered a variety of arts and crafts classes. In 1983, the Montes de Ocas were struggling to make a living, teaching dance in Julian, when they were invited to Ramona to teach with Arts Unlimited. But philosophically they ran afoul of their hosts.

“We’re child-oriented. We’re community-minded and see it as a global picture. They’re training performers, not people,” said Arvie Degenfelder of Arts Unlimited.

Degenfelder, an officer and a dance teacher with Arts Unlimited, had invited the Montes de Ocas to join as teachers, giving all her students to them. Once the couple applied the rigorous training techniques that had shaped their careers, relations began to sour. Degenfelder says it was a “marriage that went awry.”

The couple pretty much agrees. “When we came here people viewed ballet and gymnastics as arts and crafts--something to do after school,” said Dana, who once danced as a soloist with the Martha Graham troupe. “Then they really saw we were professionally oriented. Within two months we had about 200 students and the other teachers had about four each. They let us know very early on that they didn’t want to deal with professionals.”

The Montes de Ocas eventually were told to leave Arts Unlimited.

The parting was not friendly. Artistic tempers flared, and when an older woman struck Louis, he filed a suit, an unusual move in a small town, that alienated the Arts Unlimited leaders, one observer said. Many of their students remained with Arts Unlimited after the Montes de Ocas left.

Those once-fiery relations have cooled somewhat, Degenfelder and the Montes de Ocas say. Although there were some objections raised by a few members of the community, a troupe of the dance students will take part in a large Ramona Centennial celebration May 18.

For the couple, it has been a slow struggle working as private dance teachers outside Arts Unlimited. “The whole community didn’t say, ‘Oh wow, we’re waiting for this,’ ” Dana said. “It just plain took two years to train raw material to show the community what we’re doing.”

The Montes de Ocas’ American Gymnastics and Ballet Academy occupies a cramped studio carved from space in a scruffy industrial park. There, students learn the great historic choreography for ballets such as “Sleeping Beauty,” “Petrouchka” and “Swan Lake” that the Montes de Ocas know from their years of professional dancing.

It’s a long way--culturally--from the bright lights and sophistication of New York City to 136 10th St. in Ramona, where a farmer driving a mud-spattered pickup truck may let out a youngster in leotards.

But, if the couple had not had a child, they might still be dancing in New York. Ten years ago they had achieved the kind of artistic success most dancers only dream of: dancing the second lead parts in ballets. Dana was soloist with the Harkness Ballet; Louis had been recruited by the American Ballet Theatre (ABT). They both spent a season as soloists doing modern dance with one of the Martha Graham companies.

Louis, a Dominican Republic native and a skilled gymnast, had been nominated for the U.S. Olympic Team in 1974 but gave up a shot at the 1976 Olympics when ABT called.

Dana grew up in Kansas City and wanted to be a ballerina since she was a child. She met Louis in New York. With the birth of Charity, their attitude toward the city and dance changed.

New York was no place to raise a family, they felt, but professionally there was no place else to go. They gave up the fast lane and looked for a small town atmosphere. They are in their mid-30s, and had they not left New York, their careers would be winding down now anyway.

Sitting in their home, which is heated by a wood stove, Louis laughed at the irony of their situation. “We went to New York City and made it there,” he said. “We’re struggling here in Ramona.”

The Montes de Ocas gave up New York and the ballet big leagues two years after their daughter’s birth. They had visited San Diego years before and liked it. They moved west in 1977, but found San Diego still too much of a big city. They moved to Julian in 1980, but that was too small to support a dance school.

In Ramona they are elated at the progress their students have made. After two years some of their 7-year-old gymnasts already are executing advanced aerial dismounts such as gainers. The young dancers do abridged versions of such masterworks as “The Nutcracker” in recital, to which the Montes de Ocas typically add gymnastic routines.

Louis sews racks of exquisite costumes for the recitals, which tend to be full-blown dance concerts. His garage is jammed with six sewing machines. He labors late into the night, turning out scores of costumes required for their productions. Under the label Patrouchka, he also makes most of his family’s clothes.

He has 50 costumes to make for their academy’s next program, a performance of “Sleeping Beauty” and selections from “Les Sylphides.” The free concert will also include 10 members of the Ballet Society of San Diego as guest artists in “Sleeping Beauty.” It is scheduled for 7 p.m. May 2 and 2 p.m. May 3 at Olive Peirce Junior High School, on Hanson Lane in Ramona.

The colorful costumes may have caught the imagination of the children of Ramona, but the training has caught the parents. The real benefit, O’Steen said, is the self-assurance the children are learning.

“The personal growth, the entire growth of my daughter since working with them, is incredible,” O’Steen said. “It’s accomplishment, grades; it’s everything. I happen to love a little bit of finesse. A little touch of class never hurt anybody.”

And the rest of Ramona is coming around.

“It’s a tough community,” O’Steen said. “It’s quiet, serene--very rural. It’s difficult to take people who have been raised here and put them with metropolitan-thinking people.”

After almost 2 1/2 years, the Montes de Ocas are happy with their gains, particularly that their students relate to their professional approach to dance and gymnastics.

“It’s typical for a community like this to have 10 different dance teachers in two years’ time,” Louis said. “That way no one is really commited.

“In the dance world you go after solid goals. We’re working three to five years ahead as opposed to month to month. Now we have goals. The kids can go as far as they want.”