Dancers Jumping for Chance to Earn Degree.

IMAGINE choosing a photo of yourself dancing. You find one from a few years ago in which you're caught midair in brise vole en arriere, your right leg slicing back to beat, your body arching smoothly like a fish that's hurled itself out of water. Now you are asked to describe, anatomically and kinesiologically, everything that is going on in that picture. What are your joints doing; what bones, ligaments and tendons are central to the action? What is happening on the neurological level that allows your brain to signal the left leg to maintain its elongation while the right leg keeps moving, and, while you're at it, describe cellular metabolism, would you please?

Last fall, seventeen professional dancers embarked on just such a problem in their first class--Biology 117, Anatomical and Physiological Bases of Human Movement. It's part of a new, accelerated, undergraduate part-time degree program called Liberal Education for Arts Professionals, begun by St. Mary's College in Moraga, California, twenty-five miles east of San Francisco. Each dancer selected a personal dance photo and then, in a class worthy of pre-med students, dissected the arcane anatomical events of the chosen pose. They fared so brilliantly, according to LEAP founder and St. Mary's professor Claire Sheridan, that their instructor Suzanne Martin was chagrined; she had never before given out so many A's.

"Dancers are so intelligent," said Sheridan, herself a former jazz and ballet dancer and an instructor who has taught in Bosnia and elsewhere in Europe, India and Russia. "They have astounding memories, they're deeply focused and incredibly disciplined." But while other athletes and artists have the chance to go to college, she explained, "dancers don't necessarily have that option, because by 18 they are embarking on their professional careers. They work six days a week and tour for long stretches," she said. "There's no way they can take time out to get a degree."

With a proselytizer's passion and an educator's practicality, Sheridan is intent on changing that, without asking dancers to give up a day of their careers. LEAP is a program she is tailoring to the dancers' needs as snugly as a leotard; one that she hopes will become a model for similar programs around the country.

The idea began percolating a couple of summers ago when Sheridan, founder of the dance program at St. Mary's, where she received both her bachelor's and her master's degrees, was teaching dance history at San Francisco Ballet's summer school. During a break she decided to watch the dancers rehearse.

"I was thinking of the depth of their artistry and all the years that they had put in to become the dancers they were," she said, "and suddenly the idea popped into my mind that we should simply give them all master's degrees!"

But real master's degrees weren't available for the asking, and as she sorted fantasy from fact, she also began asking the dancers about the viability of a degree program fitted to their needs. "I started poking around and asking dancers if they thought they would go for this. They put me in touch with Muriel Maffre, this great San Francisco Ballet principal who would go home after her performances--where people threw roses to her--and work on her University of California Extension course! Then I arranged a general meeting to discuss the possibility of a B.A. program. I figured four or five people would show up. Thirty-five came!"

Sheridan persuaded the administration at St. Mary's, a private Christian Brothers LaSallian college built around the "Great Books" tradition, to accept an elegant means to college-educate professional dancers in three years; up to one year of credit could accrue from two exhaustive analyses called Experiential Learning Portfolios: one about the dancer's life experience, and another covering his or her professional career. Up to thirty additional units could be gained by challenging courses through examination, courses such as advanced ballet or stage design--areas that a dancer has already mastered during his or her career. Math, science, religion and language proficiency are also required, along with intensive writing seminars to prepare students to compile their portfolios. With a lot of ingenuity and no small sacrifice of time, dancers can earn degrees with one course a semester, for little more than $13,000.

"What makes the LEAP program work is the portfolio section," said Mark Baird, former ballet master of Northern Ballet Theatre of England, a dancer with the Joffrey Ballet and Teatro Comunale of Florence, and now a management recruiter. "You can get up to one year's credit for dance and life experience, and that makes it practical for working artists to enter a degree program. At the same time, the program ascribes intellectual value to an artist's career," he noted, "something that happens nowhere else. We all work forty-five to fifty-hour weeks. The dancers finish performing by 10 P.M., get home at midnight, then study until 2 A.M.," and the next morning they have to be in class. The program is demanding, Baird said, but unlike other degree programs, it understands the exigencies of a dancer's life.

Another important part of the program is the period of special study called January term, a monthlong lull between ten-week semesters that can flexibly begin in the fall and end anytime during the year. For this intensive, self-directed class, every student embarks on an independent, in-depth project with the freedom to choose a subject relevant or unrelated to his or her major. Topics this year range from the psychology of healing, being researched by San Francisco Ballet's Kester Cotton, to the works of James Joyce, which San Francisco Ballet dancer Dalene Bramer chose.

No less crucial to LEAP's success is how accommodating it is--classes literally come to the students. Every Sunday and Monday night, for four hours, sessions are held at the San Francisco Ramada Inn's Lombard Room. The hotel is four blocks from the War Memorial Opera House, and it sits on the same corner as the BART subway on Market Street. Of the ten dancers now enrolled in each class, some, like Beth Burleson, a former teacher at the Martha Graham and Alvin Ailey schools in New York City who now lives in Santa Barbara, drive five hours to class; others make the trek from neighboring counties. The "classroom" is as unglamorous as backstage. The fluorescent light over the two writing teachers' heads flickered during the first class of the new semester--Writing for the Major--and the dais where they sat was flounced with a red skirt. But poised over their own notebooks, the dancers were as serious in this funny little room as they would be performing Agon, discussing essays on how to read a book or manage time.

"English is my second language and I've been studying by myself for four years preparing for this," French-born Muriel Maffre explained to the class. "I may or may not use this degree, but I want to have doors open. Right now my focus is on the discovery and learning process, which I hope will help me refine my ideas regarding what I want to do when I retire from performing."

Even when retiring doesn't mean leaving the performing world, dancers like former ballerina Wendy Van Dyck still need to retool. "My memories of school weren't great, so when Claire proposed the program I was fascinated, but it took me a year to think about," said Van Dyck. She had been spotted in Missoula, Montana, by Harold Christensen when she was 11, and had arrived at the ballet company at 16, having already completed high school as the valedictorian of her class. She left San Francisco Ballet in 1996 after seventeen years.

"I've always been a voracious reader, but I'd had such a bad experience in high school--I was terribly shy and scrawny and not in the right social group," she laughed. "Then after I left the ballet I took an art history class at one of the museums and it reignited my passion to learn."

Van Dyck, who co-directs the Lawrence Pech Dance Company with former American Ballet Theatre dancer Pech, used January term to force herself to choreograph her first dance, a solo to some little-known Chopin nocturnes she played as a teenager. "I've found that LEAP is a huge time commitment but the rewards are tremendous. I feel like I'm opening my mind and finally finding a connection to the world and to history. I think it's going to give me a sense of confidence intellectually."

For Baird, the goal is the degree, but a degree is also insurance. "I have to resist being parental," he laughed, "but these younger dancers don't realize yet that when they finish dancing they're going to be way ahead of everyone else by having a degree. They also don't really understand that they could get injured and have to go out and find another job." Without a college education, their prospects are severely limited.

With a degree in hand, LEAP participants hope certain doors will open and new careers will evolve. In a sense, getting a college degree is a ticket into the mainstream, and, for many, a mark of intellectual credibility. But that's not all. Now, says Van Dyck, "I can tell my physiotherapist exactly where it hurts."