Grover Dale redefining success: it's not enough to start on Broadway and win a Tony--this dance veteran wants to give back.

You have the drive and the passion, but is that enough to get the job?" asks Grover Dale of a room filled with young, hopeful dancers. "It may not be. The audition system is flawed. Until something better comes along, we are stuck with it. You may be blessed with a beautiful body and the ability to pick up steps quickly and nail a triple pirouette, but is this enough to get the job? There are many reasons why some get chosen and others don't. Often you are typecast, or passed over simply by the way you walk into the room." So what is enough to get picked? Being solidly prepared.

Broadway veteran and Tony Award-winner Grover Dale tells it like it is in his audition-training workshop, "Knowledge Central for the New Dancer." He guides his students through jazz and hip-hop moves while simulating the real pace and procedures of the auditioning process. In a noncompetitive environment, he offers direct feedback and updates on the latest industry challenges, and reveals what it takes to really boost one's career. At 66 years of age, Dale astonishes his young students not only with his master's knowledge of dance but with his incredible ability to perform it. "I hope all of you can still hip-hop when you're my age," he tells them.

After years of driven ambition and the pressures of proving himself professionally, Dale has found a way of putting those years of experience to good use. He is publisher and editor of Dance & Fitness, a successful Los Angeles-based magazine launched in 1991 as an information resource for West Coast dancers. He is also host to two trafficky Web sites (www.answers4dancers.com and www.answers4auditions.com) that average some 900,000 hits per month and provide the greater dance community with everything from audition listings to casting tips and his own no-nonsense, straight-from-the-heart advice. "Knowledge Central for the New Dancer," a cutting-edge, career-enhancing workshop, is held six times a year. He still finds time to write his own Q&A column for Dance: Magazine (see page 89) and its Web site (www.dancemagazine.com), and continues to perform periodically in films, television, and commercials. Dale is a devoted father to his son, James. His wife of twenty years, Anita Morris, died in 1994.

How does a career happen? Dale will be the first one to tell you it's usually a string of lucky breaks, intuitive hunches, and mistakes turned life-lessons. In Dale's case, there was no master plan. He was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, in 1935 into what he calls "a dysfunctional family." Abandoned by his father at an early age, he grew up in near poverty in a three-room shack on a dirt road.

"My future held no promise, no expectation for success," recalls Dale. "My early years were spent learning how to survive." When he was 9 years old, a neighbor came to his house and asked his mother if he would accompany her son to his tap dance class. In exchange, she offered to pay for Dale's lesson.

"If that woman had not come to my house that day, I don't know that I would have ever stepped inside a dance studio," Dale recalls. Dance teacher Lillian Jasper recognized his talent and refused to let him stop dancing. To keep him involved, she hired him as her assistant. By the age of 15, Dale had opened his own dance studio, earning $15 to $35 a week. This was an impressive sum in 1950, and Dale quickly realized that the dance profession could support him financially throughout his life. At 17, he acquired an Equity card and his first professional dancing job with the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera. In 1953, he took off for New York City and never looked back.

Dale immediately landed a job on Broadway--selling hot dogs at the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway. It would be another six months before he felt a stage beneath his feet.

"Every day, I checked the Equity listings, but I was really clueless about getting picked at an audition. I didn't know what to wear, how to behave, or even understand how to get noticed," says Dale. "I thought if you were a good dancer you'd stand out and be chosen. It took months before I realized I needed to position myself down front." The realization paid off, and he was hired by the June Taylor Dancers to appear on The Jackie Gleason Show. A year later, he was cast in his first Broadway show, Li'l Abner, choreographed by Michael Kidd.

"Grover had a youthful spontaneity and vigor that the show required," recalls Kidd. "I saw a twinkle in his eye and a colorful sense of humor. That was just the sort of enthusiasm I was looking for. Of course, he executed the oddball movements perfectly."

Dale's next audition won him a part in one of the greatest musicals of all time. Jerome Robbins selected him over hundreds of dancers to play Snowboy in the original Broadway version of West Side Story.

"Jerome Robbins was an absolute genius," says Dale. "I remember standing behind him and watching ideas forming in the back of his head before they came out on his body. He was an extraordinary mentor and friend to me. Once you work with Jerry Robbins you never look at dance the same way again. You become acutely aware that dance goes beyond movement and has the power to convey ideas and emotions." Dale's development as an artist was now in full swing, and that meant taking responsibility for his craft and career.

"I noticed that everyone around me was taking acting lessons, had agents, and paid attention to marketing their talents. That was my wake-up call," he says. Within a couple of days, he signed with an agent and began acting lessons.

From West Side Story, Dale leaped forward into several other Broadway shows: Greenwillow (1960), Sail Away (1961), The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1963), and Half a Sixpence (1965). In 1966, he sent a fifteen-page draft for a dance show to a producer friend at CBS. To his surprise, he was invited to stage the project on national television, thus making his choreographic debut. Robbins saw the show and offered Dale the assistant directorship at his newly formed American Theater Laboratory. Then in 1969, Dale received his first Broadway assignment as choreographer for the rock version of Herman Melville's Billy Budd.

Dale's life turned again with the entrance of a beautiful young dancer/actress who auditioned for a show he was casting. "In walked this stunning redhead, and my jaw dropped," recalls Dale. "The show never made it into rehearsal, but I met the woman I was destined to make my wife and raise a family with." They married in 1973, and five years later their son, James, was born.

Morris's career was on the rise with her success in Tommy Tune's Nine. Film and television offers came pouring in from Hollywood, so the Dale family relocated to Los Angeles in 1984. Five years later Dale found himself back in New York to work with Jerome Robbins as co-director of Jerome Robbins' Broadway. During rehearsals he began to notice more than Robbins's genius.

"He appeared to draw strength from pointing out the weaknesses of others," says Dale. "I had patterned my own behavior after his, and when I began to identify some of those same qualities in myself, I knew I had to take action." The experience prompted Dale to drop out of the profession and devote himself solely to community service and self-improvement. He focused his attention on Project Angel Food, a meals-on-wheels delivery service to those suffering from AIDS.

The West Coast dance scene during the early 1990s had a rhythm and energy all its own. Los Angeles found itself in a media-dance explosion. Dale found a dance community in desperate need of a support system. He created L.A. Dance Foundation, a resource organization that produced programs, scholarships, and Dance & Fitness Magazine. In 1994, the foundation birthed the American Choreography Awards, honoring the best achievement in film, television, commercials, innovation, education, and lifetime achievement. The ACA became an important "honor our own" event to a dance community often ignored by the entertainment industry. Today Dale devotes himself entirely to his editorial work and a steadfast commitment to support young aspiring dancers.

"The struggles that were true for dancers back in the 1950s still exist today," Dale says. "The road has taken on some new curves, but it's still a long, hard road. Passion and drive were not enough then, and are certainly not enough today." The industry bar continues to rise with choreographers throwing out "two counts of eight" auditions and no second chances. Producers and choreographers look for well-trained dancers who can also sing, act, and shine their inner light, all without skipping a beat.

"I feel for dancers who don't have the tools or experience to cope with the stresses of a dance life and make informed career decisions," explains Dale. "I'm in a position where I can assure them that their dreams are possible. For many, my experiences offer strength and hope." Dale spends umpteen hours a week answering questions about agents, dance training, auditions, family pressures, teachers, and much more.

"Quite often, I share my own experiences with them. I make suggestions and give them ideas on how they can actively achieve their career goals and believe in their own potential for success," says Dale. Recently, he received a letter from a young man in Paris asking if professional training (ballet and jazz) was necessary to become a backup dancer in L.A. (see Answers 4 Dancers, Dance Magazine, November 2001, page 65). Dale wrote back with encouraging words and stressed the realities of competing with dancers whose muscle memory, acquired through careful training, carries them from one physical move to the next safely and surely. "Not having It can sneak up and bite you on the butt if you're unprepared," he wrote. "When it comes to sustaining a dance career ... that training never stops."

The young man wrote back the following day and said, "I remained focused on those words for at least ten minutes, reading them over and over. It took that long to sink in. So you gave me a wake-up call, too."

"When I receive responses like this, I feel I am getting so much more than I am giving," says Dale. "I have a Tony Award sitting on my piano, but knowing that I've affected someone's dance life for the better is the true measure of success. It goes beyond society's fame and fortune definition. This comes from the heart and from the gut. This is fulfillment!"

Rose Eichenbaum is a Los Angeles-based photographer and writer who often contributes to Dance Magazine.