For the young, a chance to give innocence a whirl

I wrote about a woman once who, due to a crippling disability, was barely able to walk. She missed out on many activities because of her infirmity, but what she missed most, she said, was dancing. She often dreamed she was whirling across a ballroom floor, for a moment free of the constraints that limited her walk to a painful shuffle.

To her, dancing represented the ultimate form of freedom, movement without the strings that control a marionette’s life or a disabled person’s gait. She longed to experience that freedom if only for a moment. But dreams are the stuff of wishes, not reality, and it was a longing she was never able to fulfill.

I thought about her the other day as I watched a group of fourth- and fifth-graders dancing in the auditorium of L.A.’s Saturn Street School. There were 34 students from Saturn and Culver City’s Farragut School engaged in a high-energy rehearsal for a program Friday at Occidental College, presented by the California Dance Institute.

I wasn’t sure why I was there. It’s not the kind of column I usually pursue. There was no edge to it, no compelling plot conflict, no dynamics of change. Just a lot of kids whirling and stomping and laughing, doing it right, doing it wrong and doing it again, flinging themselves about with a guilt-free exuberance that was contagious.

The unbridled happiness was in contrast to the outside world, where violence burns like hot cinders and children their age live in fear and hunger. Not that life is sweet for all of the energetic young dancers I watched on a sun-drenched afternoon in the mid-city area. Some, I’m sure, come from homes where there is never enough money and others, perhaps, from homes where rage and abuse turn their evenings into nightmares.

But the total involvement required of dancing momentarily frees them from all that as it freed the disabled dream-dancer from the realities that imprisoned her.

Anglos, Asians, African Americans and Latinos shared the rehearsal floor as a pianist banged away and as the kids threw themselves into the dance with the unrestricted abandon of magical creatures whirling in the wind. It was fun, but not all for fun.

The California Dance Institute is the West Coast affiliate of Jacques D’Amboise’s National Dance Institute, an in-school arts education program that attempts to encourage discipline, self-expression and the pursuit of excellence through dance. The 27-year-old institute has been a part of the lives of more than a million kids here and abroad. In the L.A. area alone, it serves 800 elementary school students, of whom 350 will perform Friday in a program called “A Celebration of Freedom.”

Art is never wasted on the young, whether it’s dancing, writing, painting, singing, playing an instrument or just jumping up and down in rhythm. At the L.A. County Museum of Art, children who are given special tours respond with surprising enthusiasm to representations that date back hundreds of years. They’re often able to understand the arcane intricacies of the work that adults miss.

“It’s all about focus and creative expression,” Carole Valleskey was saying, during a rehearsal break at Saturn school. She’s program director of the California Dance Institute and a bundle of accelerated energy who once danced with the Joffrey Ballet. “It’s about teamwork too and about doing something right, skills that will carry over into everything they do.”

Valleskey teaches while participating, stomping, shaking, clapping and kicking right along with the kids, and falling to the floor in mock anguish when something goes wrong, adding laughter to the demands of doing it right and having fun at the same time.

As I watched, I began to realize why I was there, a vague notion that had existed in the first place and was now becoming clearer, like a memory pressing into focus. I write by projecting myself into moments I’m experiencing, and I could remember the unhappy 10-year-old that I was, escaping a broken home by racing the wind. I ran every chance I got. I ran to school, from school and at school. Running, like dancing, is intense but joyful, and there is redemption as well as escape in joy.

When I asked some of the children -- Lupe, Ali, Elizabeth, Juan, Frances and Alonna -- why they were there, all had a variety of reasons, but it took Frances to simplify it. “Dancing,” she said, “makes me happy.” Total and utter bliss is a rare human condition, too often limited to moments in childhood that begin to fade when the world beyond dancing opens to a growing up fraught with peril.

At the end of the day, sitting in an almost empty auditorium, watching a bunch of kids filling the air with themselves, I had a clearer vision of what the dream-dancer was talking about when she spoke of the release that her fantasies afforded. It took her to a place where the children were that vibrant afternoon, where no one hurts and everyone dances.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.