Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet's Choreoplan: making a ballet on the dancers of tomorrow.

Marcia Dale Weary, the founder of Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet, is a name to be honored in the ballet world. Almost every major U.S. ballet company has hired graduates from her school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania--dancers like Tina LeBlanc, Ethan Stiefel, Vanessa Zahorian, Kristin Long, Ashley Bouder, Adam Hendrickson, Abi and Jonathan Stafford, and Tara and Zachary Hench. Founded in 1955, the school started out in a renovated barn and now boasts state-of-the-art, climate-controlled studios that can accommodate more than 500 summer-session students. [] Five years ago, Executive Director Maurinda Wingard and Resident Choreographer Alan Hineline instituted a program called Choreoplan to offer talented choreographers a laboratory to create classically based works on Weary's exceptionally well-trained students. The chosen choreographers generally spend a week to ten days creating a short ballet. Patterned after the now-defunct Carlisle Project, which was created by Barbara Weisberger after George Balanchine died, the program gives the dancers a chance to perform new works while also educating the local community on how to watch and enjoy dance performances. The next Choreoplan performance is on October 20. [] New York-based choreographer Kathryn Posin participated in Choreoplan in October 2001. The following is a journal account of her experience.--Joseph Carman 

Day One

THE TRIP/CHOOSING DANCERS

I sit on the train passing through the Pennsylvania fall farmland. Now, like other choreographers, teachers, and dancers, I make my pilgrimage to Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet. I have been chosen along with choreographers Laszlo Berdo, Charles Maple, and Leigh Witchel to attend the ten-day Choreoplan, using the dancers from the three highest levels at CPYB to make a new ten- to fifteen-minute dance.

I have moved to choreographing for ballet from modern dance. I studied composition with Louis Horst, Hanya Holm, Anna Sokolow, and Merce Cunningham. Trying to adapt these templates to ballet, I often wondered why dancemakers in ballet so rarely studied choreography. I quickly realized that the expense of long hours of experimenting denied new choreographers such a chance.

Upon walking into the new and impressive complex of CPYB, I was surprised to see the excellent bodies of this young company walking in the hall and standing at the barres. These students, maybe 6 or 11 or 14 years old, have the perfect alignment, careful muscle development, and movement refinement that speak of classical ballet training. But their bodies are unacquainted with, or just reaching, puberty. Boys in dress-code black and white, when they thought they were unobserved, would, like boys everywhere, run and tackle each other in the hall.

We four choreographers watched Alan [Hineline] teach class to help us find who we wanted in this mass of bodies in blue leotards and pink tights. Asking their names, consulting our lists, we scribbled whom we had chosen to be our "principals."

"I want Rachel." "No, I want Rachel, except ... who's Rachel, the tall one or the blonde?" "You got Michael, so you don't get Marissa!" "Which one is Victoria? I'm giving her to you, even though I wanted her." I got four boys, two lead girls, and eight other girls to make a corps.

Day Two

THE FIRST DAY OF REHEARSAL

There is nothing so gnawingly horrible as the first day of rehearsal. I always promise that if it goes OK, I'll never do it again and will for sure go into another profession.

Because our young etoiles are still in high school--in some cases, grade school--we rehearse from 6:00 P.M. to 9:00 P.M., after they have finished classes. With five hours on Saturday, this gives us twenty-five rehearsal hours over the ten-day period.

For two months I had been jeteing around my studio to "Fall" and "Winter" of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. I tried to imagine partnering, using only myself, hoping the dancers would make it work. I felt safe in my studio in lower Manhattan, where I have lived for twenty-seven years. I emboited around, with my two cats occasionally observing.

But now I was in Carlisle, in a big beautiful studio, with dancers coming in the door. Not just regular dancers but future stars. What if I slighted the next Tina LeBlanc? What if I made a Sean Lavery-to-be do a really dumb step or told tomorrow's Ashley Bouder to be in the corps? I had better watch it with these kids!

I started with a corps of eight girls and gave them the beginning steps: snowflakes blowing in swirls onto the stage, a lot of piques and skimming jetes in circles. It looked great, and I loved it. I couldn't believe how brilliant I was! Or how much fun choreography was. There is surely nothing like it, nothing as spiritual, metaphoric, or evocative. (This was the manic stage that followed the harrowing angst of the earlier stage.)

Then came my favorite part of the whole experience. Somehow two extra dancers as understudies walked in. Annie and Katy, 12 and 10, had Makarova bodies: long-legged, narrow, and strong, and were smaller than the others. Instead of wondering how to fit them in with the more fully grown ones, I determined that 19-year-old boys should toss them high in the air in splits, first right, then left, while Vivaldi's most exuberant theme burst out. Everyone else onstage had jumps too, and it was an explosion of excitement and beauty--a lot like what I had been imagining in my studio for two months. I felt so happy I couldn't believe it. But I remained outwardly calm, knowing from experience that I could be a little "out there" during the act of creation. This was the feeling that kept me coming back to choreography. It reminded me of when I was 8 years old and I did tour jetes in my living room to the song "Winter Wonderland." Nothing had changed.

Day Three

PATTERNS

I have always observed the patterns of nature: the ripples that wind leaves on sand, the waving of seaweed in water. For space, line, and form, nothing competes with nature. I plot all my dances on graph paper and endlessly push pennies around the graph, searching for the right forms.

What I do with the pennies on paper isn't always easy to translate into human bodies in the studio. But these dancers were a dream. They were so immaculately trained; they knew how to stay together and how to keep their spacing marks onstage. They reported to me discrepancies in execution amongst themselves even as I stood lulled with enchantment at my beloved form taking shape. We now had two thirds of "Winter" finished.

Day Four

VIVALDI

I had only glanced at the Vivaldi score, writing instead all the measures in my notebook, with little signals beside them: "slow theme," "loud," and "sad part." The music was easy to work with, so we counted much less than I was used to. These dancers were confidently on the beat--in their clear young minds, the only place to be.

Day Five

REMEMBERING AGNES BE MILLE

I read that Agnes de Mille had to write a list of all the people who had wronged her before she could choreograph a step. This I understand all too well, and my list was a little long just now. She learned from the Native Americans always to find the "god" in what you made. I called upon her in times of need, and she showed up as a vision, often mockingly with one eyebrow raised....

The dancers seemed impressed, a little, that I had finished "Winter." No one talked about it, and we went on to "Fall."

Day Six

MARCIA

I finally had a chance to watch Marcia [Dale Weary] teach a class. Located down the hill a few blocks from "the Warehouse" where we had been working, "the Barn" was low and small and dark, with unimaginably little studios. Marcia was in the smallest one, with the 5- to 7-year-olds. Perhaps the first secret: Start small.

Although she's 65, Weary gets down on her hands and knees to give the gentle touch that allows the 6-year-old body to feel what is right. My first despairing thought was: Why had nobody pulled me up and pushed my knees back? Why did they just let me do it wrong? Maybe they didn't know or didn't care or couldn't figure out how to tell us. Marcia knew, cared, and could somehow tell the children how to do what she asked. Her powers of communication were firm and directed to each individual child. After the third time guiding a tiny foot into tendu, she questioned, "Why can't you do it like I fix it for you?" Later, holding her hand high above the 6-year-old who wore a flower on her bun, she exclaimed, "See, she jumped and touched my hand with her flower."

Marcia's quiet face and truthful eyes reminded me of the Buddhist monks I had seen in saffron robes in China, living in monasteries, meditating, gently plying a useful trade like carpentry or gardening.

Day Seven

FINISHING

Vivaldi had ended "Fall" with a sad violin solo, which the program notes said was the drunken harvesters falling asleep. But I looked out the window at the dry, brown leaves blowing and thought, "No, inside of `Fall' is death." Does one mention death to 15-year-old career-bound ballet dancers? I tried and made no impression. But when I told them to promenade en attitude for sixteen counts without wobbling, they understood, and it worked.

Day Eight

CLEANING UP

This is my worst part; let's just not talk about it.

Day Nine

RUNNING ALL FOUR NEW WORKS

Leigh, Laszlo, Charles, and I assemble with our casts in the large studio. Marcia and all the other students and faculty are there. There is a great mutual support within this community. We, the four nervous choreographers, seem to feel we've come up with startlingly different but valid works.

Day Ten

THE PERFORMANCE

A record 370 people come to Whitaker Center in Harrisburg to see the new Choreoplan ballets and hear Alan interview the choreographers about their process. I watch from the wings during my piece. The dancers seem to be doing well, but I cannot judge, since every movement they make I make along with them. (Later, while watching the video, I realized how well they had danced.)

Leigh has used Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks to make a neoclassic, astringent work that displays the etched lines of his twelve dancers. Laszlo has used a Mozart serenade in a work for fourteen dancers that poignantly demonstrates the impressive skills of the 11-year-olds as well as the older girls. Charles Maple has chosen a piece of "silly" music from the CD A Bachelor's Guide to the Universe, to which the students toss off scintillating, hard-edged moves.

In this market-driven, success-oriented time, Choreoplan gives choreographers nationwide a chance to dream, to explore, and to stretch our boundaries. It gives the young dancers a chance to work with a new set of values and become more versatile. And it gives the audience a chance to learn about process and see new work.

I ride back through the farmland, feeling the richness and wonder of fall, for now I know of a special place in Pennsylvania where they raise bumper crops of dancers.

Kathryn Posin led her own contemporary dance company for eighteen years and now choreographs for ballet companies nationally and internationally. She is the founder of the Joffrey/New School BFA Program in Dance.