Dance is elementary

Southeast performing arts students give lessons to fifth-graders

By Sam Blackwell ~ Southeast Missourian

University student Melissa Belk was wrong about the boys in Janet Wigfall's fifth-grade class at Blanchard School. Her job Wednesday afternoon was to teach the class some basic dance moves. As the 19 students filed into the gym, Belk smiled apprehensively.

"The boys are going to love ballet," she said.

In fact, the boys in the class didn't make faces or do anything goofy when Belk showed them how to plie, bending their knees outward while keeping their backs straight. "Cool," she often said in approval.

Afterward, Marc Strauss, an associate professor of dance at Southeast Missouri State University, confessed amazement.

"There was such concentration," he said.

Preparing for guests

University students are giving Blanchard fifth-graders instruction in jazz, ballet and hip-hop dancing this week in preparation for a lecture-demonstration at the school Monday by the Miami City Ballet and artistic director Edward Villella. These students and other fifth-graders from Jefferson and Franklin schools in Cape Girardeau and from Sikeston schools also will attend a Young People's Performance by the ballet Wednesday morning at Rose Theatre on the Southeast campus.

The ballet will perform for the general public in a sold-out concert Wednesday evening at Rose Theatre.

Belk emphasized to the students the importance of attitude when dancing.

"Tell yourself you are the best ballet dancer in the world," she told the children.

Meagan Edmonds, another university dance student, followed Belk's ballet demonstration with instructions on jazz-dance moves originated by choreographer Bob Fosse. She had the students manipulating pretend top hats. When they reached the end of the routine and did their bows, fifth-grader Cody Dodson suggested pretending they were throwing their hats in the air.

Edmonds liked the idea.

While putting his shoes on at the end of the class, 11-year-old Jonnie Fleming said jazz dancing was hard but ballet was easy. He can imagine himself taking a ballet class. "It was a lot of fun," he said.

Keshia Cendroski had never taken a dance class before, but had a good time Wednesday. "It was kind of like the gymnastics class I took," she said. She preferred the jazz dancing to ballet because "I like more movement," she said.

Blanchard fifth-graders will take more dance classes from university students Friday. The week after the performance by the Miami City Ballet, the university students will return to Blanchard to evaluate what the elementary students and they themselves have learned.

Rules of dance

They are teaching the Blanchard students five of the 31 national standards that have been adopted for dance education: How to view dance, how to act during a performance, how to use dance vocabulary, how costuming and lighting affect dance and related arts, and what to look for in a dance concert.

This three-week approach provides the opportunity for three generations -- faculty, university students and elementary school students -- to participate, to watch and to evaluate, Strauss said.

"I don't know any better way of helping students appreciate and understand the arts than to experience them in a variety of ways," he said.

Blanchard, Jefferson and Franklin students were targeted by the Missouri Arts Council grant that is helping bring the ballet here because they are Title I schools, where students can receive free and reduced-price lunches.

Belk and Edmonds both were exposed to dance at early ages. Noticing that her daughter liked to dance to music videos, Belk's mother enrolled her in a dance class in kindergarten expecting she'd quit in a year.

"I wouldn't let her take me out of it," Belk said.

Now she is coordinating classes at the Patti Simmons School of Dance in Sikeston, Mo., where she has been teaching for six years, and plans a career as a dance teacher.

Edmonds took tap dancing when she was 4 or 5 and was on the pom-pom squad at Central High School, but she didn't take as many dance classes as some peers did growing up. Now she wants to teach musical theater.

The Southeast junior will play Polly Patches, a clown, in Southeast's production of "The Frog Princess" Friday and Saturday. She was impressed with how quickly the Blanchard students picked up the dance moves.

"A lot of these children have this in them," she said.

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182