Through middle school and high school, Joshua Cintron spent most afternoons hunched over a punching bag at the Miracle Boxing Academy. The boxing gym was his second home, and it was a happy one; out of five tournaments he entered, he won three.
Then last year, Josh tried ballet, signing up for a class at Indian River Charter High.
This spring, as the seniors started getting college admissions letters, Josh found out he’d won a full, four-year scholarship to the dance program at Jacksonville University.
Beside himself, Josh called his dad at work. “He was choking up as he was telling me,” says Sergio Cintron, who manages a maintenance crew at the Isles of Vero. “It was one of the best moments in my life.”
Josh passed the phone to his sister. “Dad, he’s doing cartwheels around the living room,” she told him.
Before last year, neither Sergio Cintron nor his wife Normarie, both 40, had ever seen a ballet. The only dancing they did was Latin dance at parties. Raised in Puerto Rican families and living in the Bronx when Josh was born, they moved to Florida when Josh was 4 to give him and his older sister Cynthia a quieter place to grow up.
After first buying in Port St. Lucie, they moved to Vero as Josh entered middle school.
Soon after, Sergio and his young son took up boxing together. “I’d never really trained before – the only boxing I knew was street fighting,” says Sergio Cintron. “I wanted Josh to learn how to defend himself and how to get his self-esteem up. Boxing builds you up mentally and physically.”
When Josh followed his older sister Cynthia to Indian River Charter High, right away he made a good friend: Daniel Ortega, two years ahead of Josh, and an avid soccer player whose family is Colombian.
At Charter, Daniel had already discovered the well-known Visual and Performing Arts program. With VAPA, as it is called, he was an enthusiastic student of Hedi Khursandi’s dance program.
Khursandi, who danced professionally with the Vienna Festival Ballet before moving to Australia to teach with a Royal Academy ballet school, has taught ballet at Charter High since 2005. He has at least a half-dozen students who have gone on to dance professionally or have been accepted into top ballet schools and summer programs.
When Daniel Ortega graduated, he won a scholarship for an A.A. degree in dance at the Florida School of the Arts at St. John’s State College in Palatka.
That made Josh take notice. Talk of college admissions and scholarships is a constant drumbeat at Charter. “Daniel told me I should try it,” Josh recalls.
When he told his parents last year that he wanted to take ballet, they were nothing but supportive. “Our mindset has always been, whatever our kids want to achieve – dancing, or being a mechanic, whatever their goal was – we would help them 100 percent. When he decided he wanted to pursue this and get a scholarship, we were right there with him for the ride.”
Within two weeks of starting in the beginner’s class, Khursandi bumped Josh up from Ballet One to Ballet Four. “I took a big risk,” says Khursandi. “I saw the potential there, something very few people have. I thought, if I put him in the lower class, he will be bored.”
But the transition wasn’t entirely smooth. Khursandi found Josh was self-conscious in front of the more advanced students. Khursandi’s corrections are virtually head-to-toe, and most of the students had started in childhood. While Josh showed promise, the detailed stream of criticism required to bring him up to speed made him close off at first.
“He’s the hardest student I’ve ever taught,” Khursandi says. “Josh is shy, and he didn’t want to make mistakes. But I found out from his father that he was going home and practicing what we’d done in class. That’s when I knew he really wanted to do this.”
Sergio Cintron recalls that Josh would retreat to his bedroom and watch YouTube videos, repeating what moves he could. “I don’t know how much he could do in that small space,” he says with a laugh.
At school, Josh practiced with Olivia Schulke, one of Khursandi’s top students, who was just accepted at Miami City Ballet’s highly competitive summer program, among others.
“She would stand next to me at the bar and go, ‘Do this, go further, further.’ She’s been doing that since the beginning,” says Josh.
Over the course of the year, Josh picked up the essential ballet terminology – the names of the moves are all in French. Khursandi trained him to drop the defensive posture he learned in the boxing ring, relaxing his shoulders and opening up his chest.
Gradually, he lengthened the muscles knotted from hours of sparring, executing tedious pliés with his mostly female classmates, or raising one slippered foot to the ballet barre and lowering his face to his knee.
The fast footwork he learned in boxing served him well in ballet. And when Khursandi sent his students to the center of the room for the port-de-bras, a slow-motion test of grace and balance, Josh had already found what dancers called their “center”: Through the constant ducking and shifting and innumerable body blows of boxing, he’d learned how to stay upright.
As for partnering, Josh’s upper body strength from years of weight training at the gym made lifting girls over his head almost a breeze. In February, Josh danced with his buddy Olivia in a ballet in Charter High’s production of “Man of La Mancha.”
Meanwhile, Charter High adviser Terri Strazzulla heard the buzz about Charter’s latest ballet star and took him under her wing. “She was very, very supportive of Josh’s goal to get a scholarship,” says Sergio Cintron.
It was a family affair when Josh went for his first audition ever. His parents and sister all accompanied him to Florida Southern College in Lakeland, which just launched a dance program in 2015. After the audition, Josh was on the fence. But he met a girl there who told him about a more established program at Jacksonville University.
So the family loaded up again and headed north. Arriving at the audition, Josh walked in to find his old friend from Charter, Daniel Ortega, who successfully auditioned for a spot there – with a scholarship – for his junior and senior years.
After the six-hour audition and master class, Josh got back in the car. “I love it,” he told his family breathlessly.
“You could just see his eyes light up. The teachers, the campus – he was so excited, he had to tell us every little thing,” recalls his dad.
“That was a great feeling as a parent. He got it: he knew what it was he wanted to be.”
The day after he got the scholarship letter, Josh brought it in to Terri Strazzulla. “She was the first person he showed it to,” says his dad. “She started crying. She told him, ‘This is why I do what I do.’”
