Orlando Ballet School: The place for young male dancers



Orlando Ballet School: The place for young male dancers

Diane Hubbard Burns | Sentinel Dance Critic

December 9, 2007

They've come to Orlando from Dallas and Des Moines, from San Francisco, Salinas and Valdosta.

Some, like the "lost boys" of Peter Pan, leave their mothers and families behind. Others come trailing their parents and siblings.

They rent apartments or live out of RVs or put down permanent roots to pursue a dream that few teenage boys would admit to, let alone move cross-country to realize.

They want to dance ballet. And they think Orlando Ballet School is the place to do it.

"There's this incredible network that's sprung up on the Internet, and there's this buzz on the street that we train these star boys," says Peter Stark, director of the Orlando Ballet School.

Take Ezra Thomson, a Tom Sawyerish 18-year-old from Southern California. At age 15, he moved to Orlando on his own, rented an apartment near the dance school and finished high school by correspondence course.

He won gold and silver medals last spring at regional semifinals for the Youth American Grand Prix, a national ballet competition for pre-professionals, and spent last summer studying at New York's prestigious School of American Ballet.

The New York school asked him to stay; he opted to return to Orlando.

"It's been the best thing," he says of his training here.

Or Jerod Zerbe, who walks with a bit of a swagger and talks with a hint of a drawl. This Salinas, Kan., native landed in Orlando after a stint studying in New York, then a job dancing with the Northwest Florida Ballet in Fort Walton Beach.

The director there said " 'Hey, man, you're a great dancer. You need to forward yourself,' " Zerbe says. He steered Zerbe to Orlando Ballet School's growing men's program.

"The training is phenomenal," Zerbe says. "There are so few of us that having a class full of men -- it's like a giant football game without the ball."

Or take Trygve (pronounced Trig-va; friends call him Trig) Cumpston, a string bean with wavy brown hair who made a beeline here from Des Moines, Iowa, at age 13 with his mom, Sari.

For Trygve, dancing in Des Moines was "a lonely thing," says Sari. He was the only boy, and she was on the lookout for something better.

"The reputation of Orlando Ballet around the country is just huge," she says. "At the auditions for different summer programs, everybody gets together, and the parents talk. Word gets around quickly."

A year ago, mom and son moved to Orlando, leaving dad and daughter (who is in college) behind in Iowa.

"We're going to be poor, having two households," Sari Cumpston says. But so far no one regrets the choice.

Trygve, now 14, says he has found great training and is no longer the odd fellow out in classes of bun-headed girls. He has friends in the program, mentors in the company, "amazing dancers I can look up to."

Training male dancers requires special a special focus by their teachers, but it also demands determination and sacrifices from students and their families.

Parents such as the Cumpstons put normal lives on hold to do whatever it takes for talented kids.

"We go back and forth as much as we can," she says. "We're willing to make it work." But "people think we're absolutely crazy" for splitting up the family, she says.

Students, who dance as much as six hours a day, six days a week, cram in high school through correspondence courses, home schooling or early-release schedules, and pretty much forget the ordinary teenage pleasures of football games and parties.

Then, for boys, there's the social stigma.

Christopher Revels, 16, is an Ocoee high-school junior who has been dancing seriously since he was 12. He has arranged for early release this year, leaving school after third period to dance. Still, he says, he hasn't advertised his interest in ballet on campus.

"I've kept it a secret the whole time I've been dancing. . . . Kids at school don't understand what it's like to be a ballet dancer," he says.

The great unspoken benefit of the boys' ballet program may be the friends -- comrades-in-arms -- who understand the pleasure and pain of being a male dancer.

"All my friends are in this school or associated with ballet," Revels says.

His mom, Michelle, adds, "Within the last two years, when the boys program really was taking off, was when Chris really progressed."

Teens Trygve and Chris are hard-pressed to put into words exactly why they want to dance: "It's fun and exciting," "a combination of art and athletics," "it's just what I want to do."

In the boys' program, they can look to older students and professional dancers not only for help on a triple pirouette or an entrechat six, but for perspective.

"It's a beautiful thing," says Zerbe, 20, "to give our life to this antique art form. To throw it out there for the audience to love -- or not, sometimes."

Copyright © 2007, Orlando Sentinel

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