Youths Move Toward a Means of Expression

Some of the 120 St. Joseph Ballet students dancing this week at the Irvine Barclay Theatre might have made it to the stage on their own.

But the odds were against them.

Financially strapped, living in an inner-city environment amid gangs and school dropouts, these teens and preteens struggled every day with a threatening reality.

That’s why Beth Burns founded the Santa Ana-based St. Joseph Ballet company in 1983.

“I can’t take poverty away. It’s overwhelmingly complex,” Burns said on the occasion of the company’s 10th anniversary in 1993.

“But I do believe I can bring moments of joy and discovery and hope to inner-city youths through giving them the chance to express themselves through dance.”

The kids have thrived on having that chance. From a fledgling group of 20, the school has grown to more than 350 students.

A native of Portland, Ore., Burns began studying ballet when she was 10 and continued through her years at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. After graduating, she entered the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange convent and after several years there, suggested using her dance training to start an outreach program.

The Ahmanson Foundation funded a five-week summer pilot program in 1983. To get students, Burns canvassed downtown Santa Ana, putting up fliers in grocery stores and other businesses. Twenty students, “mostly girls,” she said, showed up for the first meeting.

But it was a start.

The next year, she had 40 students, the next, 60. In six years, the company grew to 100 members as Burns gave lessons to students, ages 9 to 19, in the basement of the Episcopal Church of the Messiah in Santa Ana.

By 1989--the year she left the religious order to develop and promote the company further--Burns was able to move into a new 4,000-square-foot studio in Santa Ana’s Fiesta Marketplace and nearly double the ranks of students to 190.

The company took an enormous forward step in 1999, when it moved into its $3.8-million facility at the corner of Main and 19th streets in Santa Ana, next to the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art.

The 21,000-square-foot building houses three studios and related support areas, including a workroom for making costumes and an educational center for daily academic tutoring and computer training.

“We have 366 students enrolled this year--year-round--and still 96% are on full scholarships, which pay for their training, practice clothes and costs associated with performances,” Burns said in a recent phone interview from her studio office.

At first, Burns was the only teacher. Now there are nine. Anywhere from six to nine classes are held daily for a total of 42 classes a week. Half are in ballet, half in modern dance.

“We not only increased our student body, students also take more classes now. They’re smaller in size too. So kids get better training. And the annual budget has grown to $1.3 million.”

The money comes from grants and other forms of fund-raising.

Every year, the company gives a spring concert to show itself off to the community. There’s at least one premiere a season, and this year it’s Burns’ “listen look,” performed by 27 dancers, ages 14 to 18, to a “structured improvisation” by jazz pianist Geoff Keezer.

There are also excerpts from a 1950s record of a physician describing in technical terms how to listen to a heartbeat and distinguish a healthy from a diseased one.

“What I find appealing is his invitation to really focus in on one thing. Art invites us to see more precisely or to hear more finely too. I do think that’s a gift of art, to use our senses more acutely, and that helps us feel, to sense life better.

The 30-minute work starts with “a wall of sound” that dissolves into a single heartbeat, Burns said.

It also uses silence.

“I don’t want dancers just to rely rotely on music,” the choreographer said. “One of the goals is to challenge them to increase their ability to relate dynamically to music and to make very personal choices to what they’re interacting with.”

Otherwise, Burns would like to remain silent about the meaning of the work.

“I want the audience to have the chance to use their imaginations and make discoveries,” she said. “I think enough is embedded there that they can have the fun of doing that.”

The rest of the concert, which enlists 120 dancers, ages 13 to 18, includes Melanie Rios’ “All Heaven Broke Loose” and “Embraceable You.” Rios, a Kennedy Center Latin American fellow and the company’s first guest choreographer, created both works last year.

The concert is partly underwritten by a two-year, $110,000 grant from the Surdna Foundation in New York, a nonprofit philanthropic foundation established in 1917 by John Emory Andrus.

“What they wanted was not only to fund creation of new work,” Burns said, “but also to fund having live music in the students’ classes because developing musicality can’t be created in one performance. It evolves over the years.”

* St. Joseph Ballet’s annual spring concert, Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. Wednesday-Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 2:30 and 8 p.m. $15-$35. (949) 854-4646.