Young Musicians, Dancers Thrive at Colburn School : Music: Tentative plan for shared facility with Dance Gallery offers hope for larger, improved quarters.

In a music instruction room, 9-year-old Eric Liang of Fullerton scrunches his face for a flicker of a moment as he plays a composition for the violin by Fritz Kreisler. The problem isn’t his playing or the music. From the classroom on the other side of the wall comes the thundering of drums.

In a much larger room where Ballet I is under way, three young girls do their steps while facing a broad mirror. Lisha Taylor, 7, of Inglewood loves the ballet “because I can go up on my tippy-toes more than I use my feet,” while her 9-year-old sister Melody takes the class “because I can lose weight.” Victoria Lee of Glendale likes “to stretch.”

The girls manage not to notice the eyesore behind them--a chain-link fence that serves as a barrier to the open storage room piled high with scenery, couches, pedestals and boxes belonging to USC’s drama department.

So it goes at the R. D. Colburn School of Performing Arts at USC--an independent nonprofit after-school music, dance and drama enrichment center for 800 students, from early childhood through teen-age.

For Colburn, such inconveniences as inadequate sound barriers and classroom eyesores might soon be a thing of the past. On Jan. 17, representatives of the school, backed by a $5-million pledge from Richard D. Colburn, an international businessman who is the school’s primary benefactor, said a “letter of intent” had been signed with the Dance Gallery to help finance a long-delayed shared facility that will be built in the California Plaza at 4th and Olive streets in downtown Los Angeles.

“It would be wonderful if it went through, it would be very exciting,” says Colburn’s executive director Toby Mayman, whose 11-year-old son Jake takes Wednesday afternoon piano lessons and music theory classes at the school. “But there’s a long road filled with potholes between a letter of intent and a done deal.”

Construction on the $25-million facility is tentatively set to begin in 1993, and it would open in the fall of 1994.

Still, Mayman’s innate caution--she’s been a legislative assistant to a Republican congressman from Massachusetts, worked in the Nixon Administration and was executive assistant to the president at Cal State Long Beach--doesn’t prevent her from choreographing visions of the Colburn school and the Dance Gallery as an eventual “Juilliard of the West.”

Conveniently, Colburn’s primary concentration happens to be in music, with three-quarters of its students and 60-member faculty engaged in that discipline. Mayman suggests that Colburn’s dance instruction might merge with the Dance Gallery’s program. “We want to keep a dance presence. Who keeps it is something else.”

Walking through the school, you’d never know it’s been around since 1950. It all seems too temporary. Its previous name--Community School of Performing Arts--is still stenciled over an entrance hallway.

Colburn is hardly a household name. For one thing, there have been those name changes, starting out as the Preparatory Division of the USC School of Music, with which it still shares space. In the 1970s, noted Mayman, during a “time of socioeconomic unrest in this particular area,” USC changed the name to Community School of Performing Arts, and “broadened its base” to include youngsters who were not necessarily the exceptionally gifted.

Toward the end of the 1970s, as costs escalated, USC decided to drop the facility. Along came Colburn, notes Mayman, who “for a number of reasons, tax-related and his own natural (arts) inclination” had been “looking to find and help support a school.” On Aug. 26, 1980, Colburn took over the school from USC, and Mayman became executive director. The next day, her son was born.

Several years ago, Colburn, who contributes about $350,000 a year to the school’s $1.2-million operating budget, gave the school his name. Tuition accounts for 50% of the budget.

Today the school is a multicultural microcosm. According to Mayman, the student body is 30% Anglo, 30% African-American, 30% Asian and 10% Latino and other.

“We try to provide as many young people as possible the highest quality performing arts education,” Mayman notes. “We are unique in that we run a two-track system. Anyone who is interested can come in here and study. You don’t have to audition. There’s no test to pass. And then the other track is a more conservatory level activity.”

Tuition ranges from $105 a semester for music theory or the early childhood program to $600 for training in a musical instrument. About 10% of Colburn’s students receive some form of scholarship assistance.

Probably the school’s most famous student is conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. Graduates also include jazz pianists Patrice Rushen and Eric Reed. Six of its students have been Presidential Scholars in the Arts and a Haydn Trio performed at the Ronald Reagan White House.

Ironically, there is no performing space at Colburn--for its chamber orchestra or woodwind chamber players either--and, says Mayman, that’s one of the reasons why a new building is so sorely needed. The school would triple its space from 11,000 square feet to 30,000 square feet, and she notes that individual musical instruction would not have to take place in box-like “hyperbaric chambers” with poor ventilation.

“I would like someday for there to be an American musical theater department,” she adds, “so that what is basically indigenous opera can be undertaken at a young age when kids are still creative. And then we can join dance and join music and we can join drama and of course involve all of that in composition. . . .”