BALLET PERFORMER OFFERS SPECIAL INSIGHT; COLLEGES COMPETE IN CENTRAL REGION DANCE FESTIVAL AT UNIVERSITY

Basil Thompson swears last year's movie "Billie Elliot" isn't based on his life story. But Thompson grew up in northern England, the grandson of a coal miner. He took a dance class only because his grade-school teacher convinced him it would improve his agility as a soccer player.

In the 1940s, boys in Newcastle upon Tyne, a mining and manufacturing city, did not dance in ballets. "The only thing that saved me was that I was a good soccer player," Thompson says.

At 13, he won an England-wide competition for a three-year scholarship to study dance at London's Sadler Wells Ballet School, which later became the Royal Ballet School. Ten years later he was dancing for the vaunted American Ballet Theatre in New York City.

Now a member of the dance faculty at the University of Iowa, Thompson on Wednesday afternoon taught a class in ballet at the Southeast Missouri State University Recreation Center. Two hundred dance students and professors from across the Midwest are taking classes and performing at the university this week in the Central Region Dance Festival sponsored by the American College Dance Festival Association.

The class was a rigorous two hours of arabesques, grand jetes and demi-plies. To a non-ballet dancer it seemed to be conducted in a foreign language, but years of training assured these 18 female dancers and two male dancers at least knew what to do when Thompson gave the orders. Patryce "Patches" King, a graduate of the university, accompanied the dancers on piano.

The dancers ran through some positions at the barre, then stretched their legs on the barre before finally dancing freely across the studio. With mirrors on three sides, 60 moving images roved the room.

Thompson talked about the importance of doing these moves correctly because doing them incorrectly creates muscle memory that leads to bad habits.

Joyce Yagerline, an associate professor of dance at Kansas State University, also took Thompson's class. She is one of five professors at the festival who were in the graduate program at Texas Woman's University at the same time as Dr. Marc Strauss, head of the Dance Program at Southeast and organizer of the festival.

Sharing information

The festival is an opportunity to see what other universities are doing. "It's also a chance to learn from the other teachers and make friends," Yagerline said. She compared the festival to a club convention, only these conventioneers love dance.

Katie Brogen is a senior dance major at the University of Wyoming. University of Wyoming dancers performed "Moments in Innocence," a dance Brogen choreographed, at an adjudicated concert Wednesday night.

She has studied at the Academy of Colorado Ballet and at the Colorado School for the Arts and has been taking dance classes every day for many years. So the rigors of Thompson's class were nothing new to her.

"It's like working out for an athlete," she says. "You have to do this every day, and you don't get an off-season."

On graduation in December, the Denver, Colo., native plans on pursuing a career in modern dance and choreography, perhaps in Chicago.

A long career

Thompson joined the Royal Ballet at 17. A few years later he emigrated to America and in 1960 began dancing for the ABT. A back injury curtailed his career, but long stints as ballet master at the Joffrey Ballet and the Milwaukee Ballet followed.

A father of two, Thompson is 64 now and long ago gave up performing some of the positions he drilled the students on. "A male dancer is holding onto his technique in his mid-30s," he says. "By 40 his career as a dancer is over."

Careers in dance await athletic males who have the advantage of flexibility, Thompson says. The problem is that by the time most males take up ballet it is too late. Years of training are necessary to lay the groundwork for the artistry that can follow.

"Particularly in America, boys don't do ballet," Thompson says. "It's getting better, but boys are still in demand."