Nan Cogswell Keating.

The juggernaut of Boston-area ballet studios is the Boston Ballet School, now operating out of the company's four-story, state-of-the-art building in Boston's South End, with satellite schools in Newton (west of the city) and Norwell (south of Boston). Boston Ballet's Center for Dance Education, the umbrella organization for the school, also encompasses an inner-city instruction program known as Citydance and two summer sessions, one based in the South End, and the second a program for younger children, the Children's Summer Workshop, at Wheaton College.

The school is an outgrowth of the studios established by E. Virginia Williams, founder of the Boston Ballet in 1963. However, her studios in Melrose, Malden, and Boston predated the company. Bruce Marks, artistic director of Boston Ballet, keeps a benevolent watch over the school but is not a member of the faculty. His associate director, Anna-Marie Holmes, serves as Dean of Faculty. Laura Young, former principal dancer with Boston Ballet, heads the in-town studio of the School.

In 1993, when the Boston Ballet School moved to the suburbs, Nan Cogswell Keating was asked into the fold. Keating had run her own school, the Children's Ballet Workshop, in Hingham for twenty years. From its beginning she had sent her pupils to study with Williams, whom she had met while on tour as a member of the corps de ballet of American Ballet Theatre. "When Ballet Theatre toured to Boston, five of us would run over and take Virginia's classes. I loved them. When I began my school in 1972, I was only teaching three days a week. I sent my students to Virginia on the other days," she says. Keating also sent her daughter to study in Williams's school.

Keating had left ABT in 1962. "I was a perfectionist in my work. We'd be on the bus all day. We'd barely get a warm-up and then be onstage. I felt I wasn't growing as a dancer. I had hurt my foot and took it as an omen that I should go back to school," she says. A native New Yorker, Keating had studied with Ludmilla Schollar and Anatole Vilzak and at the American Ballet Theatre School. She was graduated from the High School for the Performing Arts in 1958, then danced in Houston before joining ABT. She met Bruce Marks, who was a principal with ABT at the time.

After Keating had married, she and her husband, Roger Keating, decided they did not want to raise a family in New York. They moved to Hingham, a suburb south of Boston, in 1967. "I began my own ballet school the Children's Ballet Workshop, because the one that was located here was so bad. Hingham didn't know what ballet was," she says. "I intended to start with thirty students but ended up with ninety."

Keating's school flourished in Hingham until 1993, when she accepted the invitation to join the expanded Boston Ballet School. Five years earlier she had moved the Children's Ballet Workshop to larger quarters where she could have three studios in the old Sweaterville-Greenville building in downtown Hingham. By then her enrollment had grown to nearly 400 students. "We put in an investment of $ 10,000 for the studios but we still had only one piano and couldn't get a pianist down here except on Saturdays," she says. She had kept her association with the Boston Ballet School by sending advanced students to study there and inviting members of the company to teach in her school. "I'd send children who wanted a ballet career and allow them to perform in The Nutcracker. Because I grew up in a professional school, I wanted my students to have the same opportunities," she says. Some of the students who have gone on to professional careers from Keating's classes include Maura Weldon (Colorado Ballet), Matt Neenan (Pennsylvania Ballet), Katie Hanlon, Kerri Burns and Debbie Bums (Ballet Theater of Boston), Monique Irish (ABT 11, Joffrey II), Michelle Heyl (Tulsa Ballet Theatre), and Cristin Conroy (Ballet West).

Keating says she was glad to accept Boston Ballet's offer. "I don't have the headaches now. I don't have to worry about the taxes, the lightbulbs, a lot of little things," she says. When Keating ran her own operation, it was for profit, while Boston Ballet School is a nonprofit institution.

The Norwell branch of Boston Ballet School opened in 1993 in a converted industrial building next to the old Nickerson Theater, now the Company Theater. The 7200-square-foot ballet facility includes three studios, each with a piano, student and faculty dressing rooms, a student/parent lounge, and administrative offices. Boston Ballet spent more than $350,000 on the renovation--resources Keating could not have found on her own--to provide a beautiful, professional environment for the students on the South Shore.

Under Keating's direction, the Norwell studio offers fifty-two classes weekly, ranging from preballet and primary levels through Level 6. There are two streams: intensive and non-intensive. Fees range from $436 for the beginning classes to $2,140 for the advanced students. Scholarship aid is available for students who have reached Level 4. Beginning with Level 5, students have the option of attending classes at the Boston studio. The highest level classes, 7 and 8, are only offered in the Boston studio.

As Dean of Faculty, Holmes is trying to unify the teaching at the schools by instituting a Vaganova-based system for all levels. "I have to say it's working. Anna-Marie doesn't want to stifle the creativity of any of the teachers. We're using it as a basis. We hope to produce really fine young dancers," Keating says. Keating, who teaches eight classes weekly, heads a faculty that includes Diana Pahigian Madden, who received her Vaganova-based certification from the Hartford School of Ballet; Lise Delaplace, the founder, executive director, teacher, and choreographer for the Ecole de Danse Classique d'Aix, Aix-en-Provence; Donna Silva, former soloist with Joffrey Ballet and principal with the Bern State Theater, Switzerland; Theresa Taylor, Beth Bogush, and Ann Fonte-Abbott. Frank Bourman, former principal dancer and ballet master-associate director of Royal Winnipeg Ballet and Vladimir Kolesnikov, former leading character dancer for Kirov Ballet come to Norwell one afternoon a week from Boston. The Norwell curriculum offers preballet, then technique and pointe classes, with character classes for Levels 4 to 6.

In class with a group of fifteen level 3s, Keating teaches a bright, no-nonsense barre for fifty-five minutes before moving the students into the center. She is observant and pushes them hard. "Is that a rehearsal for the real thing?" she asks them after a combination that felt low in energy to her. The piano music is based on themes from Giselle which the company is presenting that week at Boston's Wang Center as the season's opening program.

One of the children in this class was chosen to be a Clara in the Boston Ballet's 1994 production of The Nutcracker at the Wang Center. Of the three hundred children in this year's production, ninety-five were from the Norwell studio.

Keating had produced spring performances each year, and a small version of The Nutcracker with the Plymouth Orchestra, before joining Boston Ballet School. She now feels she would like to return to the practice, to "give each of the children age-appropriate performing experiences.

"These performances are part of the education. I wanted the children, their parents, and grandparents to love ballet the way I did, the way it should be loved. Most of them thought of ballet as children in little tutus. They didn't know it was sweat, blood, and tears as well," she says.