Last Wednesday, all eyes in downtown’s Lighthouse Gallery were trained on one composition: two young dancers, seated on a black bench, bending forward to tie the ribbons of their pointe shoes.
It might have been a scene in a Degas painting, but this tableau was living. Surrounding it, a half-dozen adult artists sized up the light, shadow and proportions of two Indian River Charter High School aspiring ballerinas, dressed in leotards and tutus. While the girls struck a pose, mirroring each other, or mimicking a Degas as they did on the bench, the artists dashed to finish the double-duty figure drawing, a rarity in such studio sessions.
As for the dancers, painful as the poses could be, stretching 10 to 20 minutes, the challenge paled compared to the effort they are embarking on this summer: Molly Wicker and Katerina Schweitzer are attending two of the nation’s top classical ballet programs, both in New York City. The money they earn modeling goes to defray their expenses.
Gallery owner Barry Shapiro, an artist himself and a New Yorker, came up with the idea to hire the girls. Molly’s mother Tammy Torres is an artist and instructor at the Vero Beach Museum of Art. She once worked as a designer for Shapiro’s frame shop.
When her daughter Molly, who is just finishing up the ninth grade, was accepted into the six-week Joffrey Ballet summer program in New York, she won a merit scholarship for half her tuition. For the rest, she set up a crowd-funding page on www.gofundme.com, to raise money for the summer intensive, and Shapiro offered to join the effort.
“I don’t know if he’s just being a sweetheart, but he’s been wanting to do this since I was working there,” says Torres.
Katerina leaves in mid-July to train for five weeks at the Gelsey Kirkland Academy of Classical Ballet. She’ll be commuting each day from Staten Island, where her parents, Tara and Larry Schweitzer, grew up, and where her grandmother owned a dance studio. Katerina will live with her grandparents and commute to the city on an express bus, her mom says.
“We want her to see how real ballerinas live,” she says. “It’s not just nice hotels.”
The girls’ programs are highly selective and are among the top tier of the sought-after summer intensives around the country. Each winter, thousands of classical ballet students fan out across their various states and regions to audition for the programs, which range from ballet companies to university- and conservatory-based programs to year-round high schools for the arts. The auditions themselves become like master classes for children in small towns like Vero, and give them an opportunity to see the competition in an extremely competitive profession.
Katerina is familiar with the Joffrey, whose main company is now based in Chicago, but whose training academy remains in New York, its original home. At 11, Katerina too did a summer intensive there, but for only two weeks, as part of the Young Dancers program. Immediately following, that same summer, she took a session with American Ballet Theatre, where she was placed among the highest level of dancers her age. Her main instructor, Franco De Vita, artistic director of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at ABT. The next summer, Katerina returned to ABT.
“The first time I went, I just thought it was going to be a couple of classes a day. But it was completely different from anything I’d ever done before,” Katerina says of the dance summer camps. “I got to see a lot of talent my own age, and a lot of girls working harder than I was. I got to see this is a serious profession.”
Right off, she took to the intensity. “I was going crazy,” she says. “I just said, OK, I’m going to do it!”
Already, Katerina feels certain she wants to forgo college for now and try to dance professionally after high school. Even now, as the former Beachland Elementary student prepares to start her sophomore year at Charter, her travel to ballet academies in Melbourne and Miami is extensive enough that she must take some courses through “virtual school,” online.
While Katerina sets her sights on ballet, she is dabbling in classes in tap and jazz at Riverside Theatre’s dance program. There, she has an in with the teacher: her mother, a former Rockette, who began teaching tap and jazz last year to children from 8 to 18.
Riverside Theatre began its own summer program last year; it has grown to more than 30 students. Organizers hope it will one day compete with the larger, better known intensives to draw from an even larger pool of applicants nationwide.
Katerina says that after she tries her hand with the big league ballet companies, she would love to dance with Ballet Vero Beach, the new company formed last year by Riverside’s Adam Schnell. “It’s a great place to raise a family,” she says.
Friday, Molly learned that her gofundme.com account topped its goal of $5,900. “Wow-weeee,” wrote her mother on the webpage by way of thanks to supporters, noting that the account will remain open for a while longer. “There’s still the subway fare,” Torres says.
