What do you get when you let 400 kids dance on stage at McCaw Hall with original choreography, music and spoken-word accompaniment? A lot of excited kids, an even bigger bunch of proud parents and satisfied teachers and, Pacific Northwest Ballet hopes, some new addicts to the world of dance.
Unlike PNB's DanceChance program, which seeks out public school students with the potential to become ballet dancers and trains them at PNB, the Discover Dance program goes into various schools to inspire students and their parents to get excited about ballet. The program concludes with the public performance of "Leaping Legends" on Saturday, April 23.
Stephanie Scherpf, PNB director of outreach and education, has been helping schools connect with Discover Dance for five years. This year the program worked with 15 classrooms to prepare "Leaping Legends." The participating schools were Daniel Bagley Elementary, Eastgate Elementary, Graham Hill Elementary, John Muir Elementary, Rose Hill Elementary and Summit schools.
"For the most part, they learned basic ballet vocabulary from a PNB teacher," she said. "At Summit, we were working with middle-school students, so they've done a modern dance residency. Each classroom chose a legend or folktale as the inspiration for their choreography, and the stories range from American tall tales to Ananzi stories from Africa."
The majority of children involved had never taken ballet classes. "It was what you'd expect from your average classroom in this area," Scherpf said. "Maybe a couple of kids taking dance classes from local studios. For the most part, this was all new to them."
Besides the classroom dancer, "Leaping Legends" also features performances by PNB Company dancers in selected classical works, PNB School Professional Division Students doing Bob Fosse choreography from various musicals and the Discover Dance Student Performance Group.
The Performance Group, another program under the Discover Dance umbrella, is a collaboration with the Ewajo Dance Workshop. "It's about 40 kids, age 12 to 18," Scherpf said. "We hold open auditions every September, and they do pretty eclectic choreography that combines ballet, hip-hop, African and modern. They'll be doing two pieces for the show."
Pieces prepared by the students in the classrooms are accompanied by original music written by Seattle pianist and composer Dehner Franks and performed by musician Marius Nordal along with the Graham Hill Elementary School Chorus, directed by Cherrie Adams.
More than 200 students worked on the five large-scale banners created by visual artist Hannah Salia in different illustrative styles associated with legends and folklore from around the world. Salia led a teacher workshop for the involved classrooms that taught the teachers how to guide students in reproducing her paintings from a 2-inch-to-1-foot scale using a grid method.
The multidisciplinary approach is part of the Discover Dance plan to get students excited about the arts, as well as to create greater arts education opportunities in schools where such classes have been reduced by budget cuts. Besides the in-class instruction, the students take field trips to the PNB School to see how dancers prepare for a performance, as well as get a glimpse of the backstage work in the company's costume shop.
"Dance, drama, music and the visual arts - it's a really unique opportunity that children won't get elsewhere," Scherpf said. "I think the schools realize that this is an opportunity to enrich their students' classroom experience. In an ideal world, the teachers, in theory, could carry on this work and integrate dance into their classes even if this grant-funded program wasn't there. But the demands on teachers are so great, realistically they may not be able to embrace such art education on such a level [as the Discover Dance program]."
Another Discover Dance goal is to get children and their parents to start thinking about ballet and other dance performances as an accessible form of entertainment. "The parents are really blown away by what the students have accomplished," said Scherpf. "Most come to this not expecting the degree of professionalism that we present; they're expecting to come to a school assembly and see their kids dance on stage.
"Many are coming to our theater for the first time and seeing professional dance for the first time," she added. "And that's part of the joy for us, the joy of sharing our artform with the larger community. That's what we're doing. That's the Discover Dance community performance in action."[[In-content Ad]]
