Two-Step

Leah Bass’ dance studio is hardly noticeable as you start to walk through the busy hallways of the Millikan Performing Arts Magnet here. A couple of desks still clutter the back of the room where just two years ago, young men in shop classes learned to work wood and metal with their hands.

But the closer you get today, the louder the roar of the music and the thump of young feet hitting the hardwood floor.

Thanks to a zealous fund-raising campaign and a $15,000 gift from the Los Angeles Unified School District, Bass no longer has to teach her dance class in a cramped bungalow. She’s got a new studio and with the assistance of a renowned choreographer named Otis Sallid, her teenagers are getting training few kids their age will ever have a chance to receive.

Along with Bass, his friend and fellow dance teacher from New York, Sallid has dedicated 10 Saturdays through May to running the “Children’s Dance Project,” a workshop at the school for aspiring teenage dancers.

“He shows us what it will take to be in this profession,” says a wiry 13-year-old named Brandi Wilson.

Sallid, by the way, is no slouch in the dance world. He’s not up for an Oscar at Monday’s 69th Academy Awards show but the more than 1 billion people watching worldwide will be witnessing his footwork in a funky performance he has conceived and directed.

As the choreographer for the only dance number of Hollywood’s biggest night, Sallid’s long career will reach a pinnacle Monday. Sallid, though, says his true happiness comes from tutoring the young dancers at Millikan. Despite his own success, the dancer who spun his way from Harlem to choreographing the Oscars says he forces himself to make time to offer low-cost instruction for future dancers with limited means.

“I just had to get off my butt and get out there with them,” he says. “One reason I am offering this class is to train black students for the profession. Our youngsters come to me [for a job] and they are not prepared.”

Sallid, who has arranged dance routines for big-ticket movies such as “Sister Act 2” and “Malcolm X,” directed episodes of Fox’s “Living Single” and recently co-created the hit Broadway show “Smokey Joe’s Cafe,” is clearly excited about his first involvement in Oscar night. Still, for the last few weeks he’s been shuttling back and forth between the sleek studios of KABC-TV and the scuffed-up halls of Robert A. Millikan Middle School.

On a blistering afternoon last week, Sallid and the 32 professional dancers he handpicked from a pool of 400 were running through their Oscar-night routine, a rock ‘n’ roll romp set to “That Thing You Do!,” the title song from the 1996 Tom Hanks movie of the same name. Inside Studio 57 at KABC, Sallid, a short man with a graying goatee, angled his compact body halfway up a ladder. With the snapshot mind of a veteran choreographer, he mentally jotted down notes to toss at the dancers before they got to “take 10.”

The dancers, a mix of springy and muscular young people of all races, looked more like a casting call for an MTV dance video. And though perpetually out of breath all afternoon, most of them were sucking up their exhaustion, well aware that Monday’s show at the Shrine Auditorium will be a career milestone and the chance to work with Sallid, an opportunity to make the most of.

“He’s very confident in his work,” said Academy Awards dancer Palmer Davis. “But he’s not egocentric. Some choreographers are unable to see anything but their own vision. And his ideas evolve into creations that the group puts together.”

Sallid had to find the perfect dancers for the Oscar show while simultaneously sifting through the pool of students at Millikan for the 28 lucky ones chosen for his workshop. The audition at Millikan surprised him.

“It’s funny,” he says while taking a quick break from directing the Academy dancers. “I started the classes for black kids, but kids of all races showed up. And actually I think it’s better that way.”

And it’s safe to say the kids chosen to participate in the classes feel the same way. They are ecstatic about the chance to be tutored by Sallid. The day after the Oscar session, 10 of the students who paid $100 to attend his class were practicing a dance combination they picked up while visiting with him at the Oscar dance auditions.

Their professional counterparts may have stretched multicolored leotards over taut bodies, which they preened and protected with kneepads. But at Millikan, the kids were a motley group of all shapes and sizes, who came to class in baggy sweatpants and T-shirts.

What they lacked in training and grooming, though, the teenage dancers made up for with energy. Before starting the workshop, Sallid had dropped into Bass’ class every so often. Once he even helped by choreographing their yearly spring concert. The students say his presence has been invaluable.

When asked if her training has inspired her to pursue dancing as a career, Brandi, the 13-year-old, laughed and said: “Naw, I want to be a CPA.”

But for her stocky classmate, Lyman Guillory, dancing has provided an inspiration he never thought possible.

“I wanted to play football but they only played tag and I wanted to play tackle,” he said shyly. “But in order to play football you had to take dance. So I did it. Plus I like traveling to new places with the dancers.”

Bass says the rigorous training she and Sallid offer not only prepares the kids to become better dancers, it helps them to become harder working in general.

“It’s really a mentoring program,” she says about the workshop. “It takes a lot of discipline and responsibility to be a dancer. And those are things that will carry over to any field that they pursue.”

Sallid agrees that his dance training affected his own attitude and work ethic. In person he’s an affable aesthete, both gracious and outgoing. He maintains that his spirited approach to his work on stage, in films and even in his music videos, reflects his desire to expose the audience to the culture he cherished as a boy in Harlem.

“I grew up in Harlem at a time when you could just be walking around and see Miles Davis or John Coltrane on the corner,” he says. “It was a special black aesthetic then. Like people like Stevie Wonder, I think I have a certain appreciation for black culture and I am not afraid to put it out there--uncensored and the way I see it.”

His own bio reads like a dancer’s daydream. While trying to beef up Harlem’s artistic pool, the city of New York created an anti-poverty program that offered dancing and other performing arts training to disadvantaged children like Sallid. Why did he stick with a profession that most little boys would tease him about?

“Oh my gosh,” Sallid said. “I had a very great teacher who I fell madly in love with when I was 7 and the next thing I knew I was auditioning for the High School of Performing Arts.”

Famed instructor Alvin Ailey and others had noticed Sallid’s talent and helped him secure full scholarships to the high school, and then later to the Julliard School of Music. Those were the seeds that led to a long career as a dancer-actor on Broadway. He later won an MTV Award for Best Rap Video for his direction of Arrested Development’s “Everyday People.”

Academy Awards producer Gil Cates says he tapped Sallid for the Oscars show after their mutual friend, Debbie Allen, recommended him.

“What I liked about him is that he is classically trained, he tries to be different and he is very adventurous in the way he uses space,” Cates says. “And he brings a buoyancy and energy to the show that is wonderful.”

Sallid doesn’t skimp on those qualities in the classroom, either.

“I think it’s necessary for kids to have mentoring programs,” Sallid said. “It’s a straight-ahead lesson in what it’s like to be in this business.”