FROM ST. PETERSBURG TO TIJUANA.

`School of Hope' brings ballet to poor Mexican youngsters

IT'S EARLY SATURDAY MORNING AT Colegio La Esperanza, an innovative, visually dazzling elementary school perched on a dusty hilltop in Sanchez Taboada, one of Tijuana, Mexico's poorest neighborhoods. The surrounding streets are moving to sleepy weekend rhythms, but the school already is buzzing with activity.

Outside, a gaggle of sun-hatted parents and volunteers are walking the perimeter, picking up garbage and pruning the plants. Inside, architect James Hubbell is supervising work on a new classroom; a handful of people smash colorful tiles with hammers, while others arrange the shards in patterns and set them in grout. And there are children everywhere--playing on swings, sitting on shady benches, and munching steamy tacos in an open-air room overlooking the neighborhood's makeshift houses, ramshackle businesses, and narrow dirt roads, which are scattered up and down hillsides as far as the eye can see.

From one light-filled studio comes the sound of music--snippets of classical compositions, pre-Columbian tunes performed with drums, flutes, and conchs, and swelling mariachi-style songs. A dozen girls in ruffled skirts stand, shifting their weight from foot to foot, gazing shyly at their reflections in the mirror. A group of boys confer in the comer, practicing their steps and straight-backed stance.

"Listos, ninos?" shouts Valeri Tchekachev, the 51-year-old Vaganova Academy-trained dancer-choreographer who came to the Tijuana school three years ago with his ballerina wife, Tatiana Alexandrovna Tchekacheva. The music stops, and the hushed children take their places, waiting for their cue. When Tchekacheva starts up the CD again, the girls twirl out from the sidelines, performing folk-lorico steps, while a crowd of smaller children gathers to watch at the windows and doors.

When founder and president Christine E. Brady opened her nonprofit school eleven years ago, she knew she wanted to give the children the opportunity to develop all forms of intelligence, including psychomotor skills. "They were breaking down the walls, smashing windows," Brady explains. "The value of physical education became really clear, really fast." But Brady--who had trained as a girl with the Pennsylvania Ballet, the School of American Ballet in New York, and the Joffrey Ballet--wanted them to do more than calisthenics. She was determined that each of her students would receive ballet training.

"I wanted them to learn ballet, to teach them self-control, how to perceive their own bodies," she says. "And I wanted them to have the whole experience of the theater, to stimulate their imagination. The poverty of the poor is the poverty of their dreams. The ballet gives them something to dream about."

Through a Russian friend, Brady contacted the Tchekachevs, who were retiring from the stage and looking to teach. Tatiana danced with the Kirov, and both she and her husband were members of Perm Ballet and the St. Petersburg Theater Academy. Though their careers had taken them to dozens of countries, neither had visited Latin America, and they jumped at the chance to see something new. But nothing prepared them for life in this squatters' community of Tijuana, a city of three million souls that is known as the Wild West of Mexico's northward immigration.

In St. Petersburg, the couple had a chauffeur; in Tijuana, they learned to navigate themselves through unpaved, potholed streets choked with smog-producing cars and aggressive drivers. They spoke little English and no Spanish; all their early communications were dependent on a translator. But they spoke the language of dance, and the children understood.

"I've taught all over the world," Tchekachev says in now-fluent Spanish, between rehearsals, "and maybe you find 20 percent of students who can move, who have talent to be dancers. Here, I would say that 50 percent of the students have talent. It's interesting to me how Mexicans handle movement. Here there's lots of sun, lots of energy. The people are alive."

At Colegio La Esperanza (which translates as "school of hope"), all students, ages 4 to 12, receive two hours of ballet each week; the dance training is a central part of Brady's goal of "bringing the humanities to humans," as she puts it.

"I was looking for something that transcends class barriers, and I think dance does that," explains Brady, a former engineer with degrees from Princeton and Stanford universities. "We have so many divisions in society, and so much negative propaganda that keeps people fearful of each other. Dance brings people together across different classes, different ages, different cultures. It's something for the children to enjoy."

The schools' best dancers are encouraged to participate in Don Quixote Comes to Tijuana, Tchekachev's Russian-rooted, Mexican-flavored homage to Cervantes's story of an errant knight's adventures and misadventures. Assembling music from twenty-five different sources, from Puccini to unknown composers of traditional native Mexican songs, the Russian choreographer has created a whimsical ballet with an Oaxacan Dulcinea, desert hallucinations, serenading cantina waiters, and Day of the Dead skeletons. The show also features the Russian couple and advanced, U.S.-based dancers in lead roles.

"PEOPLE IN THE COMMUNITY FIND THE dance so enjoyable that it's built trust and understanding between them and us," says the American-born Brady, who also helped bring sewers and electricity to the neighborhood. For Tchekachev, the artistic benefits of creating new choreography and putting on a show are bolstered by the joy of teaching underprivileged children for whom dance class is a singular cultural experience.

"The children have nothing; their parents are barely getting by. So I am not only a teacher to them, but also a father, also a mother. I feel, with dance, that I can bring the whole world to these children," explains Tchekachev, who is known to the children simply as Valeri. "My class is about ballet, but it is also folklorico and the art of the body--the way they walk and move and carry their bodies. The kids that do well in ballet do well in their other classes. It makes their spirit grow."

Tchekachev's goal is to prepare students for professional ballet school; already he has a few who are ready. One promising student, 12-year-old Dana Gonzalez Casas, graduated from Colegio La Esperanza last year. But she returns every week for the Tchekachevs' free Saturday class, which is open to the community. Her middle school doesn't have dance training, and she wants to keep up her skills until she can study ballet at a far-away public high school; there is no local high school in Sanchez Taboada, this ciudad perdida (lost city) of 180,000 within official Tijuana.

"I love the class, and I love how Valeri teaches me," says Gonzalez Casas, who dreams of becoming a ballerina. "The opportunities I've had to perform have made me feel so good inside."

For Carmen Yebra, 11, dance is a total experience--a physical challenge, an emotional boost, and a psychological oasis from her parents' constant struggle to survive. "I'd rather be dancing than running around in the streets, which is what my friends do," she says. "I wonder a lot about my future, because there is no money to pay for [professional] ballet lessons. But I know I want to be a dancer. It just makes me feel so great."

Jennifer de Poyen, dance critic for The San Diego Union-Tribune, is a 2001-2002 mid-career fellow of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University in New York City.