The Doctor Is In

Jose Costas might have become a doctor. But then he discovered dance. Disco, specifically.

A native of Puerto Rico, the former Ballet Hispanico principal dancer who starts teaching at Orange Coast College today began taking private disco classes in the ‘70s because he wanted to dance with his girlfriend.

“Salsa I knew how to do,” Costas, 41, said in a recent phone interview from his home in South Pasadena. “Disco wasn’t ours. That’s how I started.

“To tell you the truth, my parents were not happy about that, even though my mom and dad were beautiful dancers in terms of social dance. I was supposed to be a doctor.”

The middle of five children, born in 1958 after twin sisters, Costas got as far as earning a bachelor’s degree in biology as a step toward medical school.

But when he went for disco lessons at the studio of Julie Mayoral in San Juan, “they told me, ‘You’re very talented. You’re doing so well, why don’t you teach, too?’ I was taking jazz, too,” he said.

“There was a program on TV where [Mayoral] would choreograph and dance,” he said. “So I started to appear in those numbers. Then she asked me to take ballet. Then I got into it.

“Once my parents started to watch me dance on TV,” he said, “that kind of made them feel good, too.”

Because most dancers begin studying ballet as children, Costas had to spend hours in dance studies playing catch-up--and this after an already full schedule of college classes.

Still, he learned quickly enough to go on to dance with Ballet Concierto de Puerto Rico for three years. Then he pursued studies at NYU’s Tish School of the Arts, arriving in 1984 and two years later earning a master’s degree in dance performance and choreography.

“I figured at some point I would want to teach at a college and perhaps direct a degree program,” he said.

Further work at Jacob’s Pillow in the Berkshires, Mass., led him to try a professional career in New York. He auditioned for Ballet Hispanico on his second day in the city, and was immediately offered a job.

Orange County audiences first saw him perform when Ballet Hispanico danced several months apart in 1989 at

Plummer Auditorium in Fullerton and at OCC’s Robert B. Moore Theatre.

He stayed with the company nine years, then left.

“I was already 35,” he said. “At times, my body was aching a lot. The repertory--modern and ballet--was very hard. And I couldn’t do all the things I wanted in terms of choreographing.

“I needed to start thinking about the future. My whole thing was, when I’m 40, I would like to be set in terms of a job and do a switch smoothly.”

He got a job at Cal State Dominguez Hills in 1995, and taught there for four years before coming to Orange Coast College.

“It was shocking for me when I got there,” he said. “I was not working with students who wanted to be professionals, except for maybe one or two. The quality was not what I was used to. I was used to being in a dance company in New York. That’s so many people’s dream.

“It was also shocking in terms of the move to L.A., where the dance energy was so dissipated I could hardly feel it. It was traumatic for me. I hated it at first.

“But I saw it was a great opportunity--a transition from being a professional to being the professor.”

He shook things up a bit at the school by making his students--a multicultural mix--not only create a dance work in his lecture class, but also by insisting that the students form integrated groups.

“I found that all the Latinos bunched up together, all the black Americans started getting together, all the Asians stayed together. I wondered, ‘How is that possible? It can’t happen, not in my class.’

“I said, ‘My groups need to be multicultural.’ That’s the only way you get to know a person. If you know someone’s culture, you can know why they react to a situation differently than you do, because of different upbringing.

“It forced my students to learn about each other, about this person who is different. . . . I got a lot of negative reaction at the beginning. ‘This is lecture class, not a dance class,’ they said. But there is no way to learn about dance by reading or lecturing about it. You have to put people in the position of dancers, choreographers, designers or whatnot. Then they can appreciate the work we do.

‘Onstage, it looks so easy. But to put movement together is hard, and to perform before a class also is hard.

“In their journals, many of them [also] wrote, ‘Thank you for forcing us to do this project because I had a great time, made great friends, and learned to appreciate the work that goes into dance.’

“It was fantastic. It was my little effort to unify L.A. If I have the opportunity to do that at OCC, I will. There’s no way you can know what we go through as dancers unless somehow at a different level, you do it.”

Costas may get that chance, though officially he’ll be teaching ballet, modern dance and repertory. But he also hopes to initiate projects such as teaching dance workshops to local elementary school children, and adult public social dance classes that focus on Latin themes and culture.

He also will take part in OCC’s annual faculty dance concert on Nov. 6 in the Robert B. Moore Theatre.

“OCC has a great dance department. The director [Karen Shanley] has so much energy,” he said. “My time at Dominguez Hills was fantastic. Now I’m ready to move on.”

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Chris Pasles can be reached by e-mail at Chris.Pasles@latimes.com.