Dance in Her Heart

Christy Reeder remembers a day in class when her teacher, Beatrice Collenette, eyed her ballet moves and said bluntly: “You’re milking the cow. I need more.”

Reeder continued with a little more flair, a little more drama.

Collenette had learned such unorthodox critiques from one of ballet’s acknowledged masters, Anna Pavlova, the Russian ballerina regarded by many as the greatest ever. To milk the cow, in Pavlova parlance, was to have the technique down pat but not quite convey emotion.

Sunday, celebrating her 100th birthday in San Juan Capistrano, Collenette and about 50 family members, friends and past pupils reminisced about the nine years Collenette had spent studying under Pavlova and the lessons she passed on to them.

Relying on a wheelchair but still donning black ballet slippers and a ballerina’s bun, Collenette--perhaps Pavlova’s last surviving student--received visitors with a kiss on the cheek and ready advice.

While greeting her great-granddaughter, 13-year-old Meganne Damon, Collenette asked, “Do you dance?”

“No,” Meganne’s mother, Tammy Damon, responded, “but she’s a straight-A student, plays the flute, plays the oboe and wants to play the bassoon.”

“Oh,” Collenette said. “That’s good. Look into dancing.”

This domineering attitude, her students said, comes in part from a lifetime spent training. Collenette supported her family starting at age 10 and moved away from home to travel with Pavlova’s troupe at 13.

“She’s very strong-willed,” daughter Joan Collenette Damon said. “She was a very strict and definite teacher.”

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Collenette didn’t start dancing until age 9, when her mother found out about a musical audition and urged her daughter to learn dancing--two weeks before the audition.

Collenette recounted tales of taking the pointe shoes and practicing walking across the kitchen, “up, up, up, fall . . . up, up, up, fall.” Two weeks later, her feet badly hurt, she got the part and was soon discovered at a London dance class by Pavlova.

After studying with Pavlova, who died in 1931, Collenette moved to New York and performed in two Broadway shows before marrying a journalist and moving to Pasadena. There she opened the Collenette School of Dance, which is now in its 60th year and is overseen by her daughter.

Many of Collenette’s students recalled the lessons they learned at this “most prestigious studio in the San Gabriel Valley.”

They remember the way Collenette would instruct her pianist to come up with tunes “light and fluffy.” They remembered how she always treated them as ladies.

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Occasionally, Collenette put students to tests of character as well as technique.

Kathleen Morgan, Collenette’s student for more than 20 years, vividly remembers one day when she was 17 and Collenette abruptly said, “I’m going to post a letter. Take the class, please.”

Surprised, Morgan walked to the front of the class, took hold of the stick and led the next 15 minutes at the barre. It was Collenette’s way to determine whether Morgan had the strength to teach.

“She had a way of transforming girls’ lives,” Morgan said.

But for all the discipline she learned from Pavlova, Collenette told tales of her own desire for flair. Collenette, a lover of pirouettes and turns, was told by Pavlova that she tried too many.

But, Collenette told her students, “When she wasn’t looking, I’d slip some in. It’s good for fun.”

Sunday, Collenette was still having fun, chatting about the autobiography she’d completed and delivering her opinions on just about everything.

Former student Rosemary Sage brought a reframed pastel portrait she had done of Collenette a few years ago.

“Hold on to it for me until I’ve gotten my book published and have a new wall at my new house,” Collenette said in her hoarse but steady voice.

Sage, in amazement, couldn’t respond. “She’s planning on moving, and she’s 100!” Sage said later. “That’s very Collenette.”