Bolshoi Bound : Laguna Niguel Teen to Spend Spring in Moscow With Famous Ballet Company

With his short blond hair, bright blue eyes and ruddy cheeks, 15-year-old Ryan Turley looks like the quintessential surfer dude.

But his talents lie in a wholly different realm--the world of pirouettes and plies , tights and tendus .

Turley, a Laguna Niguel resident, is one of the best young male ballet dancers in the country, one of only eight American youths to be chosen to spend next spring honing their dance skills with the Bolshoi Ballet Company in Moscow.

He almost didn’t take the Russians up on their offer, for he was also offered a full year’s scholarship to the San Francisco Ballet School. Trying to better his chances of soon joining a major ballet company, he has decided to end his instruction in San Francisco next February and hop a plane to Russia.

There, he hopes to further improve at the activity he most enjoys and that consumes his life.

“I like the strictness of it,” said Turley, a 5-foot-8, 120-pound sophomore at Aliso Niguel High School in Aliso Viejo. “Every day you can learn something new or perfect a step. You have to work really hard, but you can achieve a lot of things with it.”

As a little boy, Turley never thought he’d become a ballet dancer. When he was 11, his older sister was taking ballet lessons and one day dared him to join her. He began with tendus , simple exercises, and plies , a basic ballet movement in which dancers slowly bend their knees outward while keeping their backs straight.

Eventually, he graduated to more difficult moves, such as air jumps, in which he jumps and turns around twice in the air before landing gracefully. He liked the precision and discipline ballet entails so much that now ballet is his entire focus.

“You need to be technically perfect,” said Turley, who practices at least two hours a day, six days a week at the prestigious Coast Ballet Academy in San Clemente. “It takes as much strength as other sports, but you have to keep it more confined because it’s an art. You can’t be like a football player and go ‘Aargh.’ You have to make it beautiful to watch.”

This isn’t the first time this budding ballet star has spent months away from home. He spent the first semester of last year studying at the School of American Ballet in New York, and has worked with the Bolshoi’s summer academy in Vail, Colo., the last two summers. When he is away at ballet schools during the school year, he takes his academic high school courses by correspondence.

Coast ballet director Lawrence Rosenberg said Turley is agile and flexible and a self-motivated quick learner.

“He came in here an 11-year-old boy who had no idea of what ballet was. He had no clue,” Rosenberg said. “But he is very gifted and has gone from zero to 60 in a very short time.”