Fargo family tradition: teacher Marnee Brant carries on where her father left off.

Fargo, North Dakota, sitting in the rich farmlands of the Red River Valley, is home to the Marnee Brant School of Dance Arts. Marnee opened her school in ah expanding part of this sprawling town of 91,000 in a building under a looming water tower. Or rather, she reopened the school her father Clare Brant founded forty years ago. I grew up in Fargo, and as a child studied with her father, an inspirational man with movie star looks who had me arching into o lift on my very first day of class. This past winter I come back to the snowy town on the plains for o week to make a piece for Marnee's advanced students.

MARNEE BRANT, 54, a sprite with spun-gold hair and the long, slim legs of a ballet dancer, gives a crisp and rhythmically defined barre to her advanced students. After a long day in school the girls, 12 16 years of age, are alert and seem excited to be there. With notable kindness toward each, Marnee corrects the rolled ankles, the incorrectly placed arms, and the alignment of the hips. The girls reach center practice, battling visibly to maintain the corrections. Brant keeps her distance, circling the group and then pounces with the right word at the right time. "Embrace the turn," she cries out. For some, the moment comes together, and a new feeling for the beauty of ballet is won.

Marnee's parents, Letitia and Clare, opened their school in 1949. Her mother died young, and Marnee continued to train under her father's guidance. Clare Brant, whose school had grown enormously in fifteen years, was later killed in an automobile accident. "I was traumatized. I was a lost little girl," says Marnee. "But even though I was only 14, I taught my father's classes and gave a recital with forty students."

But the school was to die with him, and Marnee continued her studies with Arnold Spohr at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and Robert Lunnon of the Royal Allegra Ballet in Chicago. Though a gifted dancer, she did not progress--the left side of her body did not respond in the same way as her right. "My teachers and I were mystified," she says. "I began losing confidence. Ballet had created continuity in my life, but now that the left side of my body did not serve me, the continuity was broken. I stopped dancing, went to college, and married."

It was only later, at the birth of her son Nick, that a very real spinal irregularity was found. When her daughter Laura was born, Marnee wanted her to have ballet training. So in 1994, she began to offer classes at the Creative Arts Studio in Fargo. "I had no intention of going back to teaching, but a group of little girls came who were serious and wanted to work bard and who remain with me today."

"Marnee cares deeply about every student. She is a nurturer and a motivator," says Gene Okerlund, former Director of the Arts in the Fargo Public School System, which is the umbrella organization for the Creative Arts Studio. "Once you get children motivated, they learn so much faster."

Last year, Marnee outgrew the space at the Studio, and opened the Brant School of Dance Arts. She teaches a staggering twenty-four classes a week to more than 115 students aged 4 to adult. Some of these classes are jazz and tap, but ballet is the main focus.

Marnee observes, "Today's child sees so much movement--TV, the competitions. Everywhere they look, they are overwhelmed with an explosion of steps. They want to be dazzled--the harder the better. I sometimes have to give them steps that are beyond them to keep their interest." But with Marnee's careful attention and focus, eventually they learn that it is concentrated work that will bring results. "They begin to understand what it is to build strength and achieve technical mastery," she says. Time will tell where her students will go on to dance, as her oldest career-bound student is just 15.

Today Fargo has grown from its roots as a little Scandinavian farming town into a racially and professionally diverse city. But fifty years later there is still a dance teacher named Brant inspiring students to leap high on the plains of North Dakota's Red River Valley.

This fall, New York-based choreographer Kathryn Posin will stage Scheherazade for Louisville Ballet.