THE YOUTH MOVEMENT : St. Joseph Ballet’s Mission to Train Underprivileged Kids Has Grown by Leaps in 10 Years

Happy Birthday to the St. Joseph Ballet Company, celebrating 10 years of making a dream happen--bringing free dance training to financially strapped inner-city youths.

The company, the brainchild of Beth Burns, a former member of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange, has grown from a fledgling group of 20 to more than 350 students.

A party is in order, and the company plans to celebrate by giving dance concerts today through Saturday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. The centerpiece will be a new work, “Dancing Into One,” created by Burns to a score commissioned from Cirque du Soleil resident composer Rene Dupere.

“It’s really overwhelming what’s happened in 10 years,” Burns, 37, said recently.

“Ten years ago, I asked myself: ‘What contribution can I make to the poor? I can’t take poverty away, it’s overwhelmingly complex, but I do believe I can bring moments of joy and discovery and hope to inner-city youths through giving them the chance to express themselves through dance.’

“Our story is really a story of that mission unfolding.”

Maurisio Alconedo, a 10-year-old from Santa Ana, has experienced moments of joy since joining St. Joseph Ballet nearly two years ago.

He feels safer at the ballet school--gangs don’t hang out there, he said, as they do in his neighborhood--he likes how dancing “builds your muscles,” and he enjoys the feeling of a job well done.

“Beth feels proud of me (when I perform) and I feel, like, good,” Maurisio said. “I feel more happy.”

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Burns has always believed that dancers need music “as fish need water to swim in,” so she seized the occasion of the company’s 10th anniversary to commission a score from Dupere, whose music she first heard in 1987 when the Canadian-based Cirque made its first U.S. visit.

“I was really enthralled,” she said. “Rene’s music is for movement. It has a real clarity of feeling. It has young energy, sophisticated rhythms. He develops his themes in an exciting way.”

Dupere recalled how Burns doggedly pursued him. “She called me in 1990 and asked if I wanted to write a ballet,” he said in a phone interview from his home in Montreal, Canada. “At that time, I was too busy.

“She kept calling. She sent me videos. I was really impressed. The work she does in Santa Ana--I thought it was social work. I saw it was artistic work.”

As a result, he felt he didn’t need to lower his standards. “I just composed for a ballet company, not for kids or underprivileged kids. I didn’t compromise. I did what I really wanted to do.”

They first talked about the theme in general. “I like when people talk about what they do,” Dupere said. “They give more than information. They give feelings, enthusiasm, things that are really important to me.”

After that, Burns wrote a plot outline “like we do in the circus.”

“It was more precise and had the emotions involved in each section and timings. The timings were quite loose, but they could give me an idea of what we needed.

“I really like when people are precise in what they want. Paradoxically, that gave me more freedom.”

It also helped spark ideas for a future Cirque du Soleil show, he said. “We’re starting another show that involves mythology and dreams. Working on this ballet has had a pivotal effect on me. It’s been no coincidence to work with Beth.”

Burns, a native of Portland, Ore., was fascinated by dance as a child. “I was watching ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ when I was 4 and I saw all those ballerinas!”

She began taking ballet lessons several years later and continued through college at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

But then came another calling. After graduating in 1978, she entered the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange convent. Dance re-entered her life a few years later, though, when her superiors at the convent encouraged her to resume taking dance classes. Then, when she had the idea to use that dance training in an inner-city youth program, the convent supported her by continuing to pay her salary for several years.

“I thought I’d like to go into neighborhoods where children didn’t have access to the arts” and teach them how to dance, she said.

“The experiment--and the hope--was that through my personal relationship with the young people, as well as offering quality dance, they would grow in self-esteem and a sense of accomplishment.”

Burns said her own dance training had given her “lots of things for my life-- the poise, the discipline, the sense of accomplishing something after you’ve dedicated all that work.” She now wanted to give something back.

She wrote a grant proposal to the Ahmanson Foundation, which decided to fund a five-week summer pilot program in 1983.

To round up students, Burns canvassed the downtown Santa Ana area, putting up flyers in grocery stores and other places.

A group of 20 children, “mostly girls,” showed up at the first meeting. “They didn’t know what to expect, but we had a wonderful time.

“When I work with children for the very first time,” she said, “I do want them to know the serious discipline of the art form. But that can’t happen all on Day One. I used pop music for ballet steps.

“You have to take them where they are, and before you know it, they’re opened to an aesthetic that previously they had no context for. It’s an exciting process.”

Over the next six years, she worked with inner-city students ages 9 to 19 in the basement of the Episcopal Church of the Messiah in Santa Ana.

The company grew to more than 100 members, as did support. But getting support was sometimes rough.

“Here was Sister Beth going into people’s offices and asking for money. How did people know what I could do or what was possible?”

Faith, she said, is “what carries one through.”

By 1989, she had built a sizable reputation, and the company was able to move to a classy 4,000-square-foot studio in Santa Ana and nearly double its ranks to 190.

That same year, Burns left the order to devote all her time to developing and promoting the company.

So far, close to 19,000 youngsters have participated in the training program, and the company budget has blossomed to $276,000, which largely comes from grants and other forms of fund-raising. To recruit students, St. Joseph Ballet stages annual performances at elementary and intermediate schools in low-income neighborhoods of the Santa Ana Unified School District, thus most students are from Santa Ana. Nearly all (95%) receive full scholarships, which pay for their training, practice clothes, and costs associated with performances.

“It’s a lot of hard work to keep meeting the needs of the children,” she added. “We are a very streamlined organization.”

Classes at St. Joseph Ballet run from an hour to 90 minutes. Beginning students take two a week, and advanced students may take as many as six. Rehearsals can be all-day affairs, particularly just before performances. Most students stay with the company for about five years.

St. Joseph Ballet offers children more than dance training, however. “It’s a place where they feel safe, nurtured, loved and really challenged to do their best. They also have a place where they can work out their problems.”

Mentors, she feels, “can make a profound difference in life.”

Flor de Liz Alzate of Tustin couldn’t say it better. Now 17, she’s been with St. Joseph Ballet for seven years. During that time, she says she went from being an insecure girl wearing “tight mini skirts, tank tops and make up” just to fit in with school peers, to a devoted ballet student with professional aspirations.

Burns noticed the transformation and one day asked Alzate what had brought it on.

“And I looked into her eyes and I said ‘Beth, I’m happy now.’ ” Alzate said. “I was so happy to be who I was instead of trying to be someone other people wanted me to be. And I learned all this through the ballet, because I (was surrounded by) all these people who loved me for my talents, my personality, for who I was.”

Thanks to Burns, who arranged a recent audition, Alzate has been accepted into the prestigious North Carolina School of the Arts and plans to go there after graduating high school next year.

“Beth stared out with just a dream,” the teen-ager said, “and that dream became reality. I look up to her for that. It’s incredible.”

Burns credits the childrens’ parents for the success of the program too.

“The parents have many burdens in their lives, and yet they give hundreds of hours volunteering in the productions. It’s very humbling. They’ve said very moving things about how this is intervening in their children’s lives so that their children stay out of trouble.”

Still, despite all the volunteer support, Burns spreads herself a bit thin.

“I’m the artistic director. I teach most of the classes,” which total 16 during the school year and more during the summer. “I choreograph. I write grants. I work with wonderful volunteers, and of course there are moments where one wonders how far one’s own energy will go.

“We’ve actually had a challenge to manage our growth because there is so much to do. The needs of the children have increased, because violence in the community has increased.

“Of course, there are times you don’t know how things are going to work out. You just keep working, having faith. People’s generosity comes through.”

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Burns felt that the best way to celebrate the company’s 10th anniversary “would be to provide an unforgettable forum for them to shine in. I wanted my dancers to dance their own story. So there are several incidents taken directly from the lives of some of our students.

“But I didn’t want them only dancing about gangs and the struggles, because how does that lift them out of it all? So I wanted to juxtapose the inner-city issues against a larger framework.”

The larger framework, she said, is one of “pre-Columbian culture and spirituality.”

“A trinity of pre-Columbian gods become characters in a present-day inner-city family. So as the narrative in the present time unfolds, the dancers as well as the audience can reflect on each character, representing rationality, spirit or emotion. They play out their choices and such.”

Unity, she said, “is a big enough theme for us to dance about.”

“Personal integration is essential. I want--through dance, through the arts--to give these young artists the spiritual and emotional resources to deal with the difficulties in the inner city. How to integrate yourself to deal with life is an appropriate theme for a ballet.

“We need to live life with integrity,” she stressed. “We need to have the spirit, the mind and the emotions unified. That’s what dancing and the ballet is about. I think it’s actually what makes St. Joseph Ballet such a unique and significant contribution to our community.”