Dance Teacher Taps Inner Resources

On the roof of the vacant store on Devonshire, a man is removing a large sign that is shaped like a fish and has “Eat Me” painted on it. Inside, pieces of monofilament fishing line lie tangled on the forlorn carpet and a display fixture droops half-unhinged from the ceiling.

This is not what Kathy Downey sees, however, as she scans and paces off the dusty space vacated half-a-year ago by the Taylor Tackle Shop.

Downey sees, in the eye of her mind, a long wall of glittering mirror. She sees children whip-twirling down the length of the room, flinging arms out and gathering them in again with every turn, their metal-clad shoes tattooing a hard wooden floor in a five-count rhythm, bup-bup-diddy-up, bup-bup-diddy-up . . .

Could this be the place she’s been waiting for so hard for two decades? Are the hand-to-mouth times, the gypsy times, finally about to end?

A few days later, Downey is conducting class at the dance school where she sporadically subleases space.

“Hips under!” she barks. “Tuck it! Squeeze it! Hold it! . . . five . . . six . . . Heels up over the toes! . . . seven . . . eight . . . “Omigod, MARSHMALLOW MUSCLES! . . .”

Along the walls, eight girls and two boys dip and rise through their warmups while Yaz and Boyz-2-Men pulse through the sound system. Downey, a short, energetic woman of 44, moves among them, adjusting an unstraight lower back here, a hunched pair of shoulders there, her piercing exhortations as relentless as the bass-throb of the music.

“Long necks! I want to see giraffes! . . . up, down, up, down . . . No bouncing! No jiggles! No Jell-O arms! . . . Make those heels LOOK at each other! . . . Elbows to the side! . . . Don’t stick that FINGER up!”

Downey has a reputation for refusing to compromise in training digressive young bodies to unthinking eloquence.

“She’s a tough cookie, very dedicated and demanding and precise, and yet the kids respect that,” says Linda Young of Canoga Park, whose two daughters have been taking tap dancing lessons from Downey for more than a decade.

“She really understands the mechanics of the body. A teacher from New York, a man who’d danced in ‘Sophisticated Ladies,’ saw my daughter dance and was just amazed. ‘Your feet are just wonderful,’ he said. ‘Where have you gotten your tap from?’ ”

Downey’s ways have earned a devoted following of parents, and a closetful of awards for her young dancers. In 1994, the only year the competition was held, the magazine Sports Illustrated for Kids named Downey’s Great American Dance Factory as the West Coast’s top youth dance team. In 1996, her students won first place in the California regionals of the national Showstopper competition, and second place in the finals for the western United States. Her team swept the top awards at the Kids’ Artistic Revue competition last November in Long Beach. Downey repeatedly has been honored for the choreography of her team’s numbers.

As a teen and a young adult, Downey danced with the Sonia Shaw company, appearing in live shows that featured Frank Sinatra, Cloris Leachman, Milton Berle. “But I knew at age 22 I didn’t have the technical training--the ballet--for a long career,” she says. “Ballet is the foundation of all dance. It gives you the strength and stamina and centering. I needed to find another way because I was going to kill my body.”

She began in earnest to teach, and in 1983 opened her first stand-alone school, West Valley Dance Center. Her father and uncle sold property in Big Bear to finance a maple dance floor for the place, which was situated above an auto body shop near Saticoy and Winnetka. Downey had to get to lessons early because sometimes she had to wash human urine and feces from the steps leading to the school before her customers arrived.

In the ensuing years, as partners fell away and leases expired and acts of God rendered places untenable, she reincarnated her school three times, first as Downey Academy for the Arts, then as The Great American Dance Factory.

In 1989, an auto accident caused by an uninsured drunk driver left Downey with a fractured sternum and strained back and vertebrae. While undergoing physical therapy, she had to teach from a stool, gesticulating with her arms.

In 1994, the Northridge earthquake put her out of business, disjointing the walls of her studio, breaking its mirrors, covering its wood floor in 5 inches of water.

Through the long saga, Downey has had to work at low-wage day jobs--bank teller, waitress, secretary--while teaching long evenings and weekends the hundreds of students who’ve passed under her scrutiny. At one point, she was so deeply in debt she had to move into her then-studio, where she survived a middle-of-the-night break-in attempt.

For all her work, Downey has never earned so much as $25,000 in a year. She is single and lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment. She drives a Chevy Spectrum that is 11 years old and flirting with 150,000 miles on its odometer. Savings, investments, retirement funds, these just have not been possible.

Her rewards are not to be calculated in the math of soft living, she says.

“I live for my accomplishments as a teacher. I could never leave the kids. They’re my family. There’s just no other choice for me. If I had to sit in an office eight hours a day, I’d wither away. My soul would die.”

The Great American Dance Factory has a name that rings with institutionality and permanence. In fact, like her previous schools, it exists primarily in the portable confines of Kathy Downey’s resolve.

At the end of last year, the business from which Downey leased studio space lost its lease. Shortly afterward, Downey was permanently laid off from her day job as an office worker.

She began 1998 without a job, and without home for her school, and with a dozen parents a day calling to ask if she’d found a new studio yet. Some parents even took it upon themselves to hunt for suitable space.

Landlords, Downey says, often weren’t keen on the idea of leasing to a tap-dance school. They feared the noise. They feared being liable for injuries to children (even though Downey carries a $1-million insurance policy against that eventuality).

Then she came upon the former fishing-tackle store--street-front space at a reasonable rent.

This week, she was in final negotiations on a long-term lease for the place, as well as for the vacant store next door. With investment help from the parents of one of her students, she’s hoping to devote herself full-time to the school, which she envisions as having three separate dance rooms and, eventually, training in singing, too.

“This will be my fifth school, and hopefully my last,” she says. “It’s got to be. I’m getting too old to start over all the time.”