America's spotlight is focusing on ballet

By Karen Peterson

Features and News service

WASHINGTON Ten-year-old Marcus Blum makes no bones about it: "I want to be the best ballet dancer in the world."

And no, it does not bother him that some of his friends say the field is "sissy."

"They used to tease me about that," he said. "But now I think some are jealous. When I get a walk-on part at the Kennedy Center I get paid $5 an hour for a performance and $3 for a rehearsal. That's more than they make as newspaper boys."

Miss Mary Day, director of the Washington School of Ballet here, said Marcus' potential is exceptional. But his dream is not. For increasing numbers of boys, ballet slippers are getting the jump on track and tennis shoes.

Miss Day laughed: "I used to wander around our corridors begging parents to send me their sons to teach. That's all changed now. I have 24 boys from 8 to 12 years old taking ballet classes twice a week."

Since the movie "Turning Point," which features the electrifying Mikhail Baryshnikov, the American Ballet Theater and other companies report record numbers of boys inquiring about lessons. International superstars Baryshnikov and Rudolf Nureyev have become role models for many who earlier would have thought leaping is best left to a frog.

But the presence of superstars is only one reason for the times achangin'. Dance in general has detonated excitement from coast to coast, with 80% of its 16 million fans located outside the cultural mecca, New York City. And much of the fuss has been generated over men.

New roles are being choreographed "for them, and old ones expanded to give them equal time with ballerinas. Television and movies are showing us virile, sexy, athletic, strong and graceful men who take joy in using their bodies as a medium for selfexpression.

Local ballet schools for girls and boys are springing up like crocuses. And sexual stereotypes are loosening up, so it is increasingly chic to admire stars of an art form associated in the recent past with women.

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There is another reason for men in the limelight dedicated male ballet dancers who are proselytizers for the virile image of the "danceur," who will also tackle the tough questions.

One is Peter Martins, a principal Mancer for one of the world's most respected companies, the New York City Ballet, and rumored successor

its revered director, George Balanchine.

At the Kennedy Center recently, Martins, who has a son of his own interested in ballet, talked about a question he gets constantly.

"First of all, we have to get it out of peoples' minds that male ballet dancers have to be homosexual," he said. "That image is changing, but

maybe that won't be complete even in my lifetime.

"No father wants to envision his son on stage in tights. He wants to picture him in a big leather chair, a lawyer with a cigar.

"What we have to do is expose kids to ballet. Kids come to me after a performance and say, "Wow, you jump just like I do in track. Or, 'You can move like a tennis player.' Or, 'Do you really do body building like Arnold Schwarzenegger?'

"You have to show them how good ballet can be, and we are all trying to do that all the time."

The New York City Ballet's gifted, attractive and eloquent Edward Villella was one of the first to bring raw athleticism to American dance. Now mostly retired, he spends a good bit of his time on the stump recruiting boys to ballet, including his own

son.

He laughed about how he got interested in dance himself: "I was knocked unconscious by a baseball. Seriously, I was hurt playing outside while my sister was in dance class, so my mother dragged me with her to keep an eye on us both."

He comments on the male dancer's changing image: "Homosexuality is an evident part of all walks of life now. The idea of a disproportionate association with dance is going by the boards fast. That is a product of ignorance."

Instead, Villella prefers to stress the particular satisfactions of dance for a man, the leaps and jumps, the pyrotechnics that make audiences gasp.

He said, "Before you can soar, you must learn total discipline. Then you must understand its musical, aesthetic and dramatic framework. Then you must make the soaring seem as if it is done with total abandon.

"Then and only then will you have total freedom. And for that moment you come completely and totally alive."

In this country, it used to be if you could breath and were male, you could make it through ballet school and often into the big leagues. But O more. Competition for top companies is intense.

The advice of the experts is to start your son young, from about age 8, with perhaps two classes a week. Start him with jazz or tap if you like, to give him the feel of moving to music, but start him, they say, before his teens.

And if he is serious about a possible career, way down the yellow brick road, Villella suggests what he looks for in a young man: "Body proportion; muscle tone; are the feet arched a bit and strong; musicality; sensitivity; desire: talent and luck.”

But he added, "Certainly you don't have to try for a career. The training and discipline can help anyone.”

Long before Baryshnikov leaped into the public's consciousness, the New York City Ballet's Jacques D'Amboise was teaching his own four sons ballet and trying to change the Continued on Page 12-B

Associated Press

Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gelsey Kirkland during the taping of "Salute to Israel," an ABC-TV special.