On Their Toes for a Way Out

Growing up in this township where razor wire crowns shop roofs like curly hairdos, a 10-year-old boy learns some simple truths. Teachers are liable to thrash you with a rubber hose if you misbehave. It’s hard to sleep at night when you hear gunfire. Be wary when you pass bars where men are drinking.

And boys are supposed to be tough: They don’t cry when it hurts, or act like girls.

So when Katlego Ragoasha told his two grown-up brothers about a chance to learn ballet, the only father figures he had flatly said no.

Ballet is for girls. Boys play manly sports, like cricket. Ballet, they warned darkly, would turn him gay.

Of 6,000 disadvantaged black schoolchildren who tried out for an intensive dance class, Katlego was one of only 32 who had made the cut. He decided to ignore his brothers’ advice.

“I wanted to prove to them that doing ballet didn’t mean I was going to be gay,” Katlego said.

The class is run by Martin Schonberg, artistic director of Ballet Theatre Afrikan in Johannesburg. Fifteen years ago, during the apartheid era, Schonberg recalls, someone at a dinner party told him that black people could not dance ballet.

Outraged at the remark, he embarked on a campaign to train more professional black ballet dancers in a country that then had none.

In a community center in this Johannesburg suburb, the children stretch toward greatness in their run stockings and beat-up ballet shoes. The afternoon sun pours through the high windows, and motes of dust dance on the sloping sunbeams.

It’s a long way to this drab hall from the stage of the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, but Russian ballet master Alexey Ilin made the journey this year. Nothing shocks him about Alexandra’s deprivation and its pockets of squalor; he sees only the children’s effort, the tears shining in the eyes of the boys and girls as they push themselves through the painful stretches and splits.

“It’s difficult. It hurts. You have to break your body,” said Ilin, whom Schonberg hired to teach the class. “They have to bear that.

“But I said, ‘It’s necessary. You need that.’ And they understand.”

All of the children say the stretches are the hardest part.

“I think I’ll never be able to do it,” Katlego said. “Sometimes I feel like I want to cry, but I can’t because the other children may laugh at me.”

Thato Moloto, 8, wanted to cry too, but “Alexey explained to us that we were going to feel pain, so I decided I was not going to cry. Boys are not supposed to be cowards.”

Ilin, 38, danced for 20 years professionally, performing solo leads and touring the world before he came to South Africa. He saw it as a wide-open country with endless opportunities to teach. “When you know a lot, you have to do something with that knowledge,” he said. “You have to pass it on.”

He turns up afternoons in an ancient Toyota, teaching the classes alongside local dancer Penny Thloloe, 24, who grew up in the township. He apologizes for his English and instead uses his hands to mold arms and bodies carefully into poses of grace and beauty. When the children do cry, he is proud, not disappointed.

“The most interesting thing is that when a boy cries, the others calm him down and help him,” he said, noting how attitudes have changed since the class began in February.

“At the beginning, they fought and swore at each other,” Ilin said.

Sometimes Ilin might prod a bottom poking out too far, but unlike the teachers at Alexandra schools, he never wields a stick or a rubber hose.

“He doesn’t shout at us. He doesn’t hit us,” Katlego said. “I respect him a lot.”

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In Alexandra’s main street, the cloying smell of rotting garbage drifts in the heat. Crowded minivan taxis jostle for passengers, and goats wander about.

The township was designed during the apartheid era for a population of 70,000, but five times that many live there now, in about 35,000 shacks and 4,000 houses. Seventy percent of households consist of more than 10 people. Unemployment is about 60%, and violence is common, with an average 51 assaults, two murders and five rapes a week in 2003-04, according to police statistics.

“There’s nothing good about Alexandra. People throw rubbish all over the place, on the streets. There’s crime,” Katlego said. He sees ballet as an escape: “There’s lots of money in ballet,” he said, imagining a future with himself featured in magazines and on TV.

None of the children had even heard of ballet before January, when Schonberg and Thloloe visited schools to explain what it was and try them out.

In a country where racial stereotypes still run deep, some parents were initially suspicious of the ballet plan because they saw it as part of white culture. When Ellen Sekgobela’s granddaughter, Dina, 9, asked to take the class, the 59-year-old was doubtful.

“She said, ‘Gran, I like it and they chose me at school,’ ” said Sekgobela, who is bringing up Dina and two siblings after their mother died of AIDS two years ago. “Then I said, ‘Ballet, it’s not our culture. It’s for whites, not for blacks.’ But I told myself, my child must mix herself with other people.”

For some, the presence of Thloloe, a black dancer who still lives in the township, helped ease those concerns, as did the children’s dedication to ballet. And Thloloe said having Ilin, a male teacher, helped overcome perceptions among some fathers that ballet was too feminine for boys.

She said one boy’s father criticized him for doing the ballet stretches at home.

“There was that resistance. It becomes a big issue in a township where the culture is very different and a man is a man,” she said. “They [the children] really do face the challenge of changing the whole mind-set. It’s like a 180-degree turn.”

Schonberg’s first attempt to train black dancers was about 12 years ago. It was done on a shoestring with a limited selection process and produced a handful of black dancers, including Thloloe. Now he is auditioning thousands more Alexandra children to choose 32 more 9- and 10-year-olds for next year’s program.

The class runs four days a week for 2 1/2 hours, and the students get a nutritious lunch before they start, a bonus for many who are used to eating mainly corn porridge.

“We are doing it better this time. It’s far more disciplined in the sense I have far more infrastructure. The first time, I had to do it out of my own pocket,” he said.

The program now gets some sponsorship from South Africa’s national lottery and a few private individuals, but still, “it’s not enough,” Schonberg said.

He said that when he trawls South African companies looking for the kind of corporate sponsors who often fund the arts, he gets polite rejections.

Schonberg says it is wrenching trying to choose future professionals, stars even, from a random group of schoolchildren. The first thing is to strike out those with skeletal flaws. Next is selecting those with the correct frame, feet and musculature.

“It is harsh. We can only accommodate a small amount, because we are not playing at it,” he said. “It’s heartbreaking because every child should have a right to explore their potential, and we can only offer a tiny group of people the luxury of finding out what’s in their soul.”

In the end, one magical thing counts beyond pure physical appearance and musicality.

“They have got to have that sacred fire in their eyes. It’s that little spark, that naughty spark in their eyes,” he said. “You just feel it when you look at a child.”

Some of the children, Ilin said, have the perfect physique for ballet but haven’t learned the mental discipline and sacrifice that a professional dancer needs. Some might never make it.

“When I started ballet, I didn’t know what I wanted or what it was useful for,” Ilin said. “After a year, I started to love it. There were many sacrifices. My friends, who didn’t do ballet, did all kinds of things. They went to the cinema at night. I could not allow myself.

“When I see the boys from Alexandra, maybe three or four of them have an understanding of the future. There is a small number who already know the profession, know that it’s what they will do.”

Asked about potential stars, Ilin mentioned several names. One of them is Lucky.

“He’s got it,” the Russian said.

Nine-year-old Lucky Mahlatsi, whose mother is a janitor and father is unemployed, was teased and bullied at school for doing ballet. The boys said it made him a girl. The girls said he’d stolen a girl’s chance to dance. Instead of going outside to play, he would hide inside the classroom.

But now, Lucky doesn’t care. “I’m proud because if people see me walking in the street, they know I’m one of the boys doing ballet,” he said.

“It’s changed me a lot. Even when I get home, I still continue doing exercises that we are doing here. It’s helped me even at school. My concentration has improved from the concentration I have been taught here.”

Thloloe said that in just eight months, the change in the students was profound. “They will become better people as they become disciplined to concentrate on certain things,” she said. “They will contribute positively and not become thieves.”

Idah Phikisile, the class’ most devoted ballet mother, helps get the children ready for class each day. She has known a lot of suffering: Her mother is an alcoholic; her child’s father abused her, and is serving 10 years in prison for raping a girl.

But watching her 9-year-old child, Ntombi, who used to be afraid to go to school, grow stronger through ballet makes her feel stronger too.

“She’s got more confidence. And she’s happy,” Phikisile said. “Even the way she walks, the movement has changed. And I think she’s now free inside.”

Dina Sekgobela never knew her father. Sometimes as she dances, the girl cannot help imagining the mother she lost watching her dance and stretch. When she thinks that her mother will never be there to see, tears pool and tumble down her cheeks.

But she is sure about what her mother would tell her if she were alive: “She’d be happy I’m doing it. She would say I must never leave it, I must go on with it.

“I will never leave ballet. I see myself as a ballet star.”