PHOTO BY PAULA MULLER
Shoemaker student Kayden Brazzo demonstrates good form during the recital.
Opportunity’s door swung wide open for Shoemaker School students who are learning the classic fundamentals of dance through a Boston Ballet-sponsored program offered at the Marblehead YMCA.
Aimed at igniting a love of dance in young minds and bodies, the Citydance program will probably not inspire every student participating in it to embrace the discipline underpinning ballet. A few students will probably fall in love with dance and grow up pursuing its various forms. Others will discover their clumsy pirouettes translate into more time spent exercising, and most of the Citydance participants at Shoemaker and 100 other eastern Massachusetts schools will embrace other new experiences and develop a love for the arts thanks to their exposure to ballet.
Before they tugged on ballet shoes and walked into a dance studio, the Shoemaker students might have heard of ballet and watched a performance on television, but chances are good they never danced.
Every school in Lynn and surrounding communities should grasp the opportunity to form partnerships as far-reaching as the one Shoemaker forged with Citydance and the Marblehead YMCA.
The students who participated in Citydance could be the future millionaires who become ballet patrons or the future teachers who introduce ballet and other art disciplines to their students. The collaboration between the Boston Ballet and Shoemaker offers the same promise that a collaboration between, for instance, the Museum of Fine Arts and another Lynn school could offer.
Schools are often focused on ensuring students learn specific lessons and make the necessary preparations to pass aptitude tests. These lessons and examinations are the building blocks lifting young minds from one learning level to another, but experiences like Citydance let impressionable children realize their talents and abilities can soar with just the smallest nudge.
No one can anticipate when the next groundbreaking artist, brilliant actor or musician will walk out of a local school into the limelight, but programs that make the arts enjoyable and achievable set students on a path that could send them to stardom or, at the very least, into a well-rounded life.