Madeline Cantarella Culpo.

The Cantarella School of Dance in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, looks like the downtown area which surrounds it: old and charming, worn around the edges, but filled with a sense of character from memories of days gone by. The stairway joining the second and third stories of the building over the local CVS drugstore and an appliance store are lined with photographs of former students. In contrast, the School of the Albany Berkshire Ballet in Albany, New York, is industrial-strength modern architecture, with one large and one smaller studio.

Both schools are owned and actively run by Madeline Cantarella Culpo, a hometown girl, who was born and raised in Pittsfield, left and then returned in the mid-195Os after a three-year stint in the first class of dance students at the Juilliard School in New York City; she never forgot the lessons she learned from Margaret Craske, Martha Graham, Antony Tudor, Louis Horst, and the rest of her teachers.

"It was like a fairy tale," she recalls. "I thought that I'd like to be a kindergarten teacher but my mom had read about Juilliard starting a dance program and packed me off to New York." However, after three years she left New York to marry musician and real estate developer, John Culpo, who was her high school sweetheart, and to raise six children back home. Culpo had started her training in Pittsfield with Hazel Slater who taught "a little ballet and a little acrobatics," and studied tap with an old vaudevillian, Ray Hart, who was disappointed when she left his classes for ballet with Eleanor Dennis. At sixteen, she enrolled at Jacob's Pillow in classes with Craske, who continued as Culpo's main influence beyond her Juilliard years.

In 1955, back in Pittsfield starting her family, she opened her first dance studio which grew and prospered, expanding her work to nearby Lenox, Williamstown, North Adams, and Great Barrington. In 1960, she founded the Berkshire Ballet, a nonprofit regional company, with her senior students. In 1978, a federally funded Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) grant of $150,000 enabled her to audition in New York for professional dancers.

With Albany only a forty-five-minute drive from Pittsfield, Culpo was able by 1981 to establish a sucession of studios in that city. In the late 1980s, when Albany was undertaking a major downtown urban renewal project, Culpo's school and her company--now renamed the incorporated, nonprofit Albany Berkshire Ballet--were invited to become the city's official ballet studio and professional group in residence at the Palace Theater, a large, renovated vaudeville theater reborn as a performing arts center.

The Pittsfield studio enrollment is 150; Albany has 350 students. Culpo's faculty also teaches at Lenox and Williamstown: Culpo herself teaches four days--two in Albany, two in Pittsfield--assisted by faculty members Theresa Holoday, Karen Knerr, Nancy Ropelewski Pierce, Kathy Milazzo, Deirdre Duffin Swindlehurst, and Lisa Hoffmaster in Albany; with Kathy Ascevich in addition to Knerr, Pierce, and Swindlehurst in Pittsfield.

An academy program is offered for students willing to make a serious commitment to ballet. "There is an academy in each school plus a junior company, so that the children have something to strive for," Culpo says. The Albany academy has four levels; the Pittsfield academy has three. In addition to classical technique and pointe, academy students are required to take modern dance. Albany features a Pilates-based class each Monday before ballet class. "I studied at Jacob's Pillow with Mr. Pilates when I was sixteen years old," Culpo remembers.

"My modern dance background made me a much better ballet teacher. The children who have stayed with modern feel very good about it. Technique is important, but you must be able to express yourself from the inside out. Modern dance frees the body," she claims.

Regarding the Cecchetti method she learned from Craske: "People constantly say that Cecchetti technique is old-fashioned. I feel that good dancing is good dancing. Technique today is very cluttered. Classical ballet done well is beautiful. It is fairly simple when you think about it." she says.

Among the professional students who have been trained by Culpo are Karl Condon and Durine Alinova (Boston Ballet), Dawn Caccamo (Joffrey Ballet), Deirdre Duffin (Pennsylvania Ballet), Andrea Duffin (Washington Ballet), and Regina Larkin (artistic director, Trisler Danscompany).

The school has summer intensive programs taught by visiting faculty. Programs from September to June range from single weekly classes to three classes weekly at the academy I level, and an unlimited number of weekly classes for junior company and professional students. An annual recital ends the school year in both Pittsfield and Albany. Students may audition for the Albany Berkshire Ballet's annual Nutcracker which tours eleven New England towns in Vermont and New Hampshire, and Pittsfield, Worcester, Springfield, Sheffield, and Weston in Massachusetts, and Albany, New York. As community service, Culpo allows children from all studios in the various locations to audition. "It's hard to separate the company from the schools," she says. "The one that loses money takes twice as much time as the ones that make money. The schools are my bread and butter; the company is my volunteer job."

"I believe that talents are passed from one generation to the other," Culpo says. "My grandfather, my father, and my brothers are all builders, masonry contractors. My father was an excellent teacher of his trade. I feel that I just branched out into a different area of building. My strength is in building dancers with a solid foundation."