Gene Zimmerman.

Suburban dance teachers get a bad rap," says Gene Zimmerman, who runs the Pompton Lakes Dance Academy in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey. "That's because a lot of them studied with other suburban dance teachers and never took serious class in New York or another major city and never worked professionally; they just opened their own studios and started passing along the bad training."

Zimmerman even recalls a suburban New Jersey teacher who taught ballet without ever having studied it himself: "He told me he had a book," Zimmerman says, "and that he taught from that--the book showed pictures of first position, second position, and so on, and that was his ballet training." Zimmerman himself didn't need pictures when he began to teach. He'd had a long career as a musical-comedy performer--"I did all the big Broadway shows," he remarks, "but I didn't do them on Broadway; I was always on tour"--and he'd had intensive training in ballet and in jazz dancing. Before moving to New York from New Orleans, Zimmerman was a gymnastics champion in high school and in college, until a serious knee injury ended that part of his career, and tumbling is an important part of the curriculum at Pompton Lakes.

The operator of a suburban studio, the teacher explains, faces very different challenges, and gains different rewards, from those of a teacher in a major city such as New York. "You get very few kids who are ever going to be professionals," he points out. "You have to compete with karate, soccer, and cheerleading, and there are absolutely no boy dancers out there: when I do a show for the high school, I have to take a boy who can move well and make him look like a dancer. You're starting to get a few boys who are ten, eleven, or twelve years old--they come in because they want to learn hip hop."

On top of that, there are the hours: Zimmerman teaches from 3:30 to 9:30 p.m. on weekdays and from 9:30 in the morning to 7:30 at night on Saturdays. Since his pupils are not professionals or aspiring professionals but grade school and high school students, classes have to be offered during their free hours.

However, there are compensations. "In a big city," Zimmerman says, "You don't get the intimacy you do in suburbs. I've been teaching in Pompton Lakes for eighteen years, and I'm part of the community. I draw students from the surrounding area and I choreograph shows for Lakewood Regional High School. In the suburbs you lose your students at college age or when they get married, but when my students get married and have children, as soon as their kids are three years old they bring them to the studio to start class."

Pompton Lakes Dance Academy has an enrollment that varies between 250 and 300, and Zimmerman teaches all classes himself, although he will sometimes have a senior student working with him as an assistant teacher. He limits each class to ten students, because he "likes to give kids individual attention."

He starts his three-year-olds off with a half-hour of ballet and a half-hour of acro-gymnastics, which emphasizes tumbling and doesn't require a complete set of gymnastics equipment. "Ballet gives them the discipline and the basic tool of all dancing," Zimmerman explains, "and acrogymnastics gives strength and flexibility." Six-year-olds start studying tap, and at six or seven they can begin taking jazz class. Ballet training continues as long as the youngsters take class; the older girls have one-hour ballet classes the second half of which is devoted to pointe work, but Zimmerman emphasizes that he does not let them put on toe shoes before they're ten or eleven whe he knows their bodies are strong enough. "Some suburban teachers start kids on toe when they're six or seven," he says, "and that's dangerous."

As a former show dancer, Zimmerman is a specialist in jazz dancing as well as in acrobatics. He studied with some of the masters, including Jack Cole, Matt Mattox, and Luigi, and most intensively with Phil Black, whose method of teaching influenced his own.

"I started out breaking things down the way Phil and Matt taught me," he says. "Now, though, the kids in suburban studios want funk and hip hop, and you have to give them things they think are fun to keep them in the studio." He knows, though, that teaching jazz dancing involves a lot more than letting the kids enjoy themselves with the movements they've seen on MTV.

"I integrate those kinds of dancing with my technique when I'm teaching jazz," Zimmerman explains. My own jazz style is lyrical and elongated--there's a lot of ballet in it." Ballet, he repeats, is the basic tool, and his students must have a good grounding in it before they can progress to jazz. His jazz classes always begin with a barre; the concluding fifteen minutes are devoted to a routine "that makes them use their brains as well as their bodies by working out the counts." Zimmerman finds that his students like Phil Black's jazz runs and his technique in general, but he's learned to vary his jazz classes, sometimes including acrobatic moves such as cartwheels, exposing the youngsters to a range of jazz steps and techniques.

"As a jazz dancer," he explains, "you need a lot of different techniques. When I see really talented kids in my school, I bring them into New York--to Phil Black's studio or to Broadway Dance Center--so they can work with some different teachers.

"I always tell them, 'Get everything you can out of a teacher. When you find someone whose style you like, stay with him and learn as much about the style as you possibly can. And experiment with different classes--learn what's right for you.'" Similarly, when he finds a girl who has a clear talent for gymnastics, he teaches her tumbling and other basic skills and then dispatches her to a good, fully-equipped gymnastics school. He has trained, he says, quite a few gymnastics teachers. "A lot of kids these days are into gymnastics," Zimmerman notes, but his biggest problem comes from mothers who are convinced that their daughters are Olympic material.

"I always tell them to let me start the girl out and teach her the basics, and to give a start in ballet, too," he says. "Then, if we see that she really has a talent for gymnastics, I'll recommend a school. Some of the girls go to a gymnastics school but keep on coming to me for tumbling and dance classes."

His own gymnastics teacher was a circus performer, and from him Zimmerman learned a method of teaching by "graduated progress" that ensures that a student has the technique required for each stage of a stunt. He also, is "constantly spotting the kids and giving them direct physical support, stage by stage," he says. That way, I can feel in my hands if they can do a stunt or if they're not ready yet."

The main safeguard against injury, though, is discipline, he insists: "Discipline in the school and discipline in every class." The discipline and concentration instilled in class, of course, carry over into schoolwork and into other aspects of their lives. Zimmerman realizes that just because he's not training most of his students to be dancers doesn't mean that he's not training them for life.