Mobilizing the Troupes

L ast week, a small army of Los Angeles kids was getting the biggest charge possible out of summer school when Jacques d’Amboise, former New York City Ballet star (1950-1984) and master of all dance educators, dropped in to give them some pointers about making their performances more vibrant, clearer and, usually, more fun.

A boyish 67, dressed in a faded denim shirt, baggy khakis and running shoes, D’Amboise looks as freshly enthusiastic as he did in the 1984 Oscar-winning documentary “He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin’.” He was in town to oversee the second week of a teacher-training session run by his New York-based National Dance Institute and the local Luckman Dance Residency Program, which takes dance into Los Angeles-area elementary schools.

At the Rosemont Elementary School auditorium downtown, teaching candidates from L.A., San Francisco and New York watched D’Amboise coach students, ages 9 to 12, each day, then tried making and teaching choreography with the children, receiving pointers from the master.

Dance Institute teacher training usually takes place in New York, but its companies now exist all over the country, as well as in Paris, Amsterdam and Madras, India. This first L.A. session came about in response to the success of the institute model as it’s been used for the last year in local schools by ex-Joffrey Ballet dancer Carole Valleskey, director of education and outreach at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex, on the campus of Cal State L.A. Valleskey hopes to expand the number of students she can reach when more qualified teachers are available.

A recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors, a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Medal of Arts, D’Amboise retired as artistic director of the institute seven years ago and says he’s now “like a circuit rider,” who goes around “editing” the dances and inspiring the troupes. Whether he’s cajoling or congratulating participants or answering questions in an interview, he likes to jump up and demonstrate with movement.

“We’ll talk more about that later,” he says to one young student who interrupts him. “You know, you’re really a good dancer.”

Question: You spent many years working with Balanchine, doing the most innovative choreography and ballet at the highest level. How did you get interested in teaching kids who aren’t dancers, starting over with them every time?

Answer: Because I was one of these kids, and someone taught me and got me interested in dance, in ballet. And then I had a whole transforming life in the arts. I thought, “Why not find out what it would be like to introduce children, especially the boys, to the performing arts and dance, to open up their hearts and minds to their own excellence and possibilities?” Our mission statement is to put quality teachers together with children in schools during school time to introduce them to the arts and use dance as that window.

Q: But you don’t teach ballet here. Why not?

A: Because ballet is extremely specialized. It’s not of the ordinary; it’s extraordinary. But everybody can dance--dance is profound. In New York, we teach a program that’s pyramid-style, 2,000 children every day in schools--no dropouts by the way. The teachers are so fantastic; they have techniques how to get children involved, so that no one is ever left out. And we have a Saturday program as well, for talented, achieving students who want to do extra work, and after that a summer program where a certain percentage can go on to get scholarships at professional schools.

But I couldn’t start with ballet here. I did introduce my sons to dance by starting a ballet class for boys, but they started in sneakers and shorts, then gradually got into ballet shoes and tights. If I said, “You’re going to wear your sister’s leotard and put on ballet shoes” right away, it wouldn’t have worked.

Q: Is there a special NDI dance vocabulary that you’re teaching here?

A: It’s what they call free-style jazz. You might take a jazz step like this [he demonstrates a simple side-back-side step]. Now I can do the same thing in Madras like this [with bharata natyam arms]. See, the step is the same, but the style changes.

Now we can do it like this [torso stiff, arms at side]--Irish. Or like a robot.

Q: What do children learn by being in an NDI program?

A: When most children come here, you tell them “step on your right foot,” they don’t even know where they are. Then they learn for the first time in their lives that they control which foot they’re going to put down; it’s not just random. Those two boys you saw just now [doing a gesture and dance routine]--Latino macho boys dancing in front of the whole class, girls laughing--if you had asked them to do that yesterday, they wouldn’t. And by Friday’s performance [an end-of-session demonstration at the Luckman], they will be transformed--by the arts, using dance and music, taught by quality people, guiding and helping them.

Q: In “Who’s Dancin’ Now” [a follow-up documentary on NDI that aired in June on PBS], where you met with kids who had done the NDI program 20 years ago, were you surprised at what they remembered, how much it meant to them?

A: What I got out of it was seeing a group of wonderful young people who went on to do other things, and they said that doing this program made them confident about themselves, made them not afraid to try things. That girl who said she failed the bar exam three times, she said, “I wasn’t afraid to admit it; when I was at NDI, if I made a mistake, Jacques would say, ‘Do it again, do it again. Now you’ve got it; let’s go on to the next step.’ Now I’ve passed the bar; now I’m going to be a wonderful lawyer.”

Well, there were other things that affected her; we don’t know how many, but that was one of them.

Q: What’s your hope for NDI in the future?

A: I want to see more of what’s happening here--this teacher training. I’d love to see NDI establish really wonderful laboratories to train teachers, and they should be in the field, in the classroom, so that they can reintroduce arts into the curriculum of schools, so it’s considered as important as math and science.

Q: How old are the kids in the NDI program?

A: Ninety percent are in the fourth and fifth grades, but sometimes we’ve done programs where we’ve invited in senior citizens, one time we had a bunch of nuns dancing, policemen ...

Q: How did the policemen get in there?

A: An NDI board member suggest one year that we do a thank-you to cops, with children dancing as cops, so I thought, “Why not real cops, dancing with New York City ballerinas?” And we did it to a song Balanchine had written--he used to give me songs. The audience stood up and cheered, so the next year we made it a regular thing. The police were Celtic warriors in a fairy tale with the kids; they were God’s bodyguards one year wearing little angel wings.

Q: Maybe you could get a Rampart Division Dance Team going to improve their image.

A: I’ve been reading about that. You know, there were policemen dancing in the movie made 20 years ago, “He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin’,” and when that movie was shown in [then-Communist] Russia, all the Russians believed it until the police came on. Then they thought the whole thing was a fraud, that I was not a real person but an actor, that the children weren’t real, they were professional. They could not believe that a policeman could dance--isn’t that wild? Now, NDI has done exchanges with Russia, and with China and India.