Boy Crazy
November 1, 2013

Four strategies to fill your program with males

“I have always believed there are boys who love to dance,” says Barbara Weisberger, founder of Pennsylvania Ballet and an artistic advisor for Peabody Dance in Baltimore, Maryland. “Of course, that’s when you can find them and get them past the doors and get past the 100 girls!”

Recruiting and keeping boys in dance is a perennial challenge. How do you get guys to open the studio door, and then once they’re in, how do you feed their interest? DT talked with five schools that maintain thriving men’s programs to learn what it is they’re doing right.

Create a class for boys only.

Five years ago, Weisberger started a project for young male dancers at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. With funding from the Estelle Dennis Trust, the program could offer tuition-free training and supplies like ballet slippers. Twenty-three joined The Estelle Dennis/Peabody Dance Training Program for Boys that first year, and while there has been attrition, many of them continued for several years. As the program has progressed, it has concentrated on attracting younger boys, 9 to 11 years old, who will be able to train through the critical high school years. Auditions are held in local schools, and word of mouth about the program is strong.

Baltimore-area boys can audition for tuition-free training at the Peabody Institute.

“The weekly all-boys class helps them get used to dancing without having to go into a class where they’re the only boy,” says Timothy Rinko-Gay, former coordinator for the boys program. If teachers spot a boy with particular dedication or potential, they might add more classes—mixed boys and girls—to his schedule.

There are four all-male classes a week in three levels for the 30 boys in the program. The curriculum follows a basic ballet model, although centerwork will include more jumps and turns, “so they feel like they’re doing manly stuff,” says Rinko-Gay.

“They like to work on things that they see older guys doing,” he adds. “It gets easier for them to stay motivated as they get older and take more dance. They see the rewards start to come through performances and watching themselves progress.”

Reach out to an underserved community.

Using hip hop and African dance to get boys in the door is one of Fabian Barnes’ tactics at the Dance Institute of Washington in Washington, DC. While he has a small percentage of boys enrolled in pre-professional classes, he has even more success with recruiting teens through his award-winning outreach program, Positive Directions Through Dance.

Barnes started the initiative in 2000 to help kids in underserved communities discover dance. The program has since evolved into a workforce development program under the Department of Employment Services. Thirty youngsters—about half of them boys—receive not just dance classes, but also a safe haven where they can get a good meal, do some homework and work on their moves. They even get a minimal stipend for putting in hours in class. Plus, by encouraging would-be hip-hoppers to use the DIW studios as a lab for their own choreography, Barnes says, he gets them used to coming to the studios.

“Guys will show up and spend hours in the studio improvising. They get used to seeing other forms of dance because they’re always here,” he says. “And if you watch them, you see they’re incorporating ballet steps without knowing it. They’re walking on pointe in sneakers, doing attitude turns. So after they’ve been in our program for a while, we might put a ballet teacher in there with them. The ones who show more interest—we might offer to put them in the pre-professional program with ballet students.”

There are many hurdles to keeping these kids in the program: everything from poor grades to trouble at home to not having train fare to get to class. The Positive Directions program manager monitors homework assignments for the kids, stays in touch with parents and teachers, helps fill out paperwork when needed. The hard work has paid off. Students from Positive Directions now dance professionally in Los Angeles and on tour with hip-hop, pop and R&B artists. In 2011, Barnes received a National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award for the program.

“Talent is not a problem,” says Barnes. “We try to help and guide them to whatever social services they need in the community. But the number-one thing is that they have to love to dance. Number two is that they have to realize that, like anything, you only get out of it what you’re willing to put into it, no matter how talented you are.”

Emphasize the masculine.

For many boys, ballet sounds like something that only girls in pink tutus do. Tammy Schmidt, director of dance at the Minnesota Conservatory for the Arts, combats that image by creating an experience of dance that can speak to boys.

“Instead of putting a boy at the back of a row of two straight lines in a recital, we do pieces that showcase the athleticism of dance,” she says. “Often choices in costuming, music and choreography tend to gravitate toward a female dancer. But the more that you can create something unique to boys, the more likely they’ll be to want to do it.”

The 45-minute weekly technique classes for boys blend barre work with strength and conditioning exercises along with some work on more exciting steps like pirouettes, or tours that allow the guys to feel challenged physically.

“Any boy of any age can come to the class, and depending on who shows up, we make it appropriate to that level. In the past we offered it for free because we had funding,” says Schmidt. “This year we are charging a minimal fee, a flat rate of $10 for 10 classes. We want to make it as accessible as possible.”

As the boys advance, they can add an extra 15 minutes to work on more specific elements of men’s technique than just leaps and turns. The goal, says Schmidt, is to get the boys to the next level, whatever that might be.

Some who started in this program are now dancing professionally, while others have transitioned into college dance programs. “If nothing else, we’ve given them an appreciation for dance,” says Schmidt.

Let students create their own dances.

There is no major in dance at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont. Though classes are held in the sports complex, dance can be used to fulfill the fine arts requirement. When faculty member Annette Urbschat took over the Creative Dance class six years ago, it drew three or four guys in a class of 12. Now, she routinely gets as many as 12 guys in a class of 16. “I ask them why they take my class, and they’ll say, ‘It’s because I can’t draw,’” she laughs. “And they can take my class more than once—each time is different because it’s not just exercises; they get to create something new. One guy took it three times!”

Urbschat describes her class as “genre-less,” an elective in which the students create their own material, exploring ideas of composition using basic movement like walking, running and everyday gestures, and expanding from there. “There was a critical-mass element—the more boys who got involved, the more saw that it’s OK for men to dance,” she says.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of athletes take the class, so she teaches the students to adapt and refine gross motor movement from martial arts, skiing and hockey into a routine. The course culminates in an outdoor annual showing in spring where hundreds of other students can watch their friends.

“The guys never thought they could be creative with movement,” she says. “And they learn to make their own choices. That introduces them to the arts, but it’s also mind-opening for them. They not only get to know their bodies, they learn that movement can be something other than competitive—it can be just about the beauty of it.” DT

Former dancer Mary Ellen Hunt writes and teaches dance in San Francisco.

Photo by Mal Druskin, courtesy of The Estelle Dennis/Peabody Dance Training Program

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