Can performing arts bring the curtain down on poverty? - City Hearts Performing Arts: A Company for Children, Los Angeles

Children Today,  Sept-Oct, 1990  by Tamar Ann Mehuron

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It was the picture of a 13-year-old boy in Los Angeles' juvenile hall that first gave Sherry Jason the idea. The boy, lacking a musical education and convicted of murder, sat at the piano playing like a protege as he waited to be sent to juvenile prison.

Watching him play, Jason, a former ballet student and a lawyer in the Public Defender's office, wondered what his case history would have been if he had taken up the piano instead of gangs. That image inspired her to open a dance school for inner-city kids.

Jason launched "City Hearts Performing Arts: A Company for Children" in January 1985, with a studio in the renovated artists' loft area of Little Tokyo, in downtown Los Angeles. With money borrowed from the family and the cooperation of a progressive principal of the nearby new 9th Street Elementary School, which serves inner-city youths, Jason began offering free dance classes to the students there. She operated City Hearts for the first six months by donating her own time and money.

Today, City Hearts touches 600 kids per week, who participate in everything from ballet to jazz, to modern dance, and acting classes. With a shoestring annual budget of $50,000, City Hearts classes are held in a studio complete with a polished wood floor and a wall-length mirror.

"These kids have a significant lack of self-esteem. Dance can build that up because when you see what your body can do, you feel better about yourself-the posture gets better, you carry yourself better," on says. And just the factor of the mirrors on the wall enables them to see themselves in a new way."

All of her students rehearse for and participate in a year-end performance

"The applause from the audience is a significant factor, because usually it is the only time that they've been applauded for anything. You can see their faces change visibly as the applause affirms them,

"The whole goal of City Hearts is to inspire," says Jason.

At a dance class with four Hispanic girls, ages 9 and 11, instructor John Pickett leads a warm-up exercise to rock music, each person rolling head, shoulders, chest, arms, legs, and torso. The girls selected the music for each part of the lesson.

"In my years as a performer," Pickett says afterward, "I never had the sense of affecting someone's life, but here it's different.

"We're here to help them achieve at their own level."

Mississippi-born, Pickett entered the world of dance while on scholarship at a boarding school. At a simple level, I'm just trying to give back."

He sees dance as a channel for introducing the concept of discipline, an alien concept to many of these kids.

"For me, dance is a matter of discipline. The first thing you have to start teaching is discipline, discipline with fun."

Flowing through the discipline, though, is an emphasis on gentleness and respect: "We look at these kids and we have no sense of what their background is. They come to me. You have no way of knowing whether they have had a bad day because they were abused the night before, and so can't focus on the movements. You have to be gentle and nonjudgmental. In a real sense these programs are a refuge for them."

City Hearts also reaches out to young, street-hardened lives outside the studio. At one of several lecture/demonstrations last year in Los Angeles' juvenile detention center, a facility housing 90 percent hard-core gang members, the City Hearts staff stressed three messages: (1) You are responsible for your actions. (2) You have to work hard and have discipline to achieve what you want. (3) You don't have to commit crime: you have a choice.

The staff faced a hostile, aggressive audience of gang members. One teenager, big and menacing, decked out in his gang's insignia and trappings, sneered derisively at John Pickett. " Can you make as much money dancing as I do dealing drugs? " asked the teen.

Pausing slightly, the dancer looked straight at him and answered, "I make enough money to pay the rent for my apartment, pay for my car, buy enough food to eat, and buy birthday gifts for my friends. And-I can dance."

This stunned the teenager, who said, "You mean I could dance instead of deal drugs?"

In January of 1989, City Hearts launched a new program in a public elementary school in Watts. A City Hearts staff teacher, Julia Hilleary, comes twice a week to 97th Street School for a half-hour dancing lesson with 22 second and third graders. Lacking a studio and an exercise bar, they make do in the school auditorium with chairs serving as a dance bar.

Their regular class teacher, Gloria Liggett, describes the challenge that Hilleary faces:

" L.A.'s ghetto is so big that you can live there and never leave. We're in Crips territory (one of L.A.'s two major gangs). One student, Durrell, 8 years old, had missed 70 days of school. He couldn't read, couldn't write his name. He was very tough and aggressive.

"But he got into ballet class and went with us to see the Frankfurt Ballet at the theater. He was so impressed with the men because they were so macho. That turned him onto reading and math.