PASADENA—Nushin, David, Cynthia and Jacob, along with their six fellow classmates ranging from 9- to 13-years-old, have been practicing dance moves for a special performance at Loma Alta Elementary School’s Open House for almost three months.
First time dancers, they have been getting accustomed to new positions, movements and terminology. These students are also getting used to being able to overcome their disabilities—all ten students are either mental or psychical disabilities or both.
With the help of Zina Bethune and Infinite Dreams, Nushin, 12, is able to pirouette in her wheelchair and Cynthia, 10, is able to hold her arms in fifth position. David, 12, is able to plié and Jacob, 11, is able to chassé. “Chase the leg, chase the leg!” Jacob says as he cross the floor. These kids can dance.
Zina Bethune
Bethune, 63, a dancer, actress and choreographer who has overcome physical challenges all her life knows what these children are going through and wants to use her experience to help them. She started her professional career at 6-years-old, acting in a Broadway play. By 14-years-old she was dancing with the New York City Ballet.
However, it was in her teenage years that a cornucopia of problems that she had been born with started to surface. She was diagnosed with scoliosis, a curvature of the spine, at 11-years-old. She found out she had hip dysplasia, a deformation of the hip joint that causes dislocation, at 17-years-old. She has lymphedema, a condition that causes sever swelling in the extremities, and tumors in the metacarpals of both feet.
As a child, she wore a back brace for two years to straighten her spine. She underwent surgery to remove the tumors from her feet. She has had both hips replaced and goes in for “maintenance” often. “I’m kind of like a car … I go in and get parts replaced,” she joked.
She must also wear what she calls “rubber nylons;” stockings that reach from ankle to thigh and take one hour to put on. “But without them,” she said, “it only takes six minutes for my legs to swell up.”
The Beginnings
However, Bethune says all of her challenges have paved the way for the things she has accomplished over the years. “When these things hit, I never thought of myself as someone who was disabled,” she said. “I just had a lot of difficulties.”
She began dancing with disabled children when she was 12-years-old, before she knew about many of her physical problems. “I didn’t know why I was doing it then. It wasn’t until I was 15 that I realized I had a foot in both worlds,” she said.
It wasn’t until 1980, when she moved from New York City to Los Angeles that she created Bethune Theatredanse, a multimedia performance group, and the Infinite Dreams program.
Infinite Dreams
According to Bethune, Infinite Dreams was the first professional dance movement in America to create a participatory dance group for disabled children. It now serves about 1,000 children in public schools around Los Angeles and Orange counties.
Bethune said much of the genesis of Infinite Dreams came out of her own life. “I felt so strongly that I really wanted to be able to extend back into this community of the disabled what I found so beautiful about dance,” she said.
The power of dance
She gave several key reasons to why she started the program: self empowerment, living a passion, and knowledge and understanding of dance and dance culture. She says it puts kids in touch with their own background and with the diversity of others.
“It’s a good place to experiment and explore; to really find one’s self,” Bethune said. All of her students are reminded that their “spirits are not disabled” and that they are not personified by their wheelchair or crutches. “Sometimes I’m in a wheelchair, sometimes in pointe shoes,” she said. But she always has the passion to have a voice and the passion to dance.
“Providing an environment like that opens the doors to a myriad of things,” she said proudly about the program.
The Loma Alta class routine
So every Wednesday, David, Jacob, Cynthia, and Nushin, along with Nicole, Tom, Matthew, Bellie, Adriana and Ian, meet in the school’s multi-purpose room. They push all the tables and chairs to the sides of the room to create their dance floor. And from 10:30am until 11:15am, they dance.
The group participates in movement exercises. “They have acted out the way water moves,” Loma Alta Principal Jennifer Yuré said as she waved her arms through the air like a river. “And they did rhythm exercises by making sounds,” she said, keeping a beat by hitting her hands on her knees.
Bethune also works with topics the students are discussing in class in these exercises. The class on May 7 was all about the solar system.
Standing in a large circle, the class started off reciting the names of the planets. Bethune then gave each student a planet name, asking them to arrange themselves by respective distance to the sun—Mercury the closest, Pluto the furthest. “Cynthia’s wearing the right color today, so she gets to be the sun!” Bethune said of Cynthia’s bright yellow windbreaker.
But the kids couldn’t just get to their spots. They needed to dance the shape of the planets until they made it to their spots.
“What are planets?” Bethune asked the class. “Are they square?” Her question was met by ten loud no’s. “Round!” they answered.
So through big arm movements and lots of spinning and twirling, each student made his or her way to the sun while dancing to some truly spacey music.
“Let’s do our pirouettes! Big arm movements!” Bethune encouraged them. “If we have our arms in fifth [position] or if we plié in first, it kind of makes a round circle!”
And when Neptune—otherwise known as Ian—got out of orbit, Bethune asked, “How far from the sun should you be? You’re burning up!”
The benefits beyond
Lila Schob, 50, their teacher, says ballet, jazz and hip-hop styles of dancing is not all her students have learned. “It gives them better body presence and helps with vocabulary [since] they’ve been learning the French terms for different movements, too,” she said.
Erik Delgadillo, 26, a volunteer aide who has worked with the students for three years, says he thinks the program is very beneficial to the students. “It gets them going and exercising,” he said. “And it’s nice for them to be able to get out of the classroom.”
Schob echoed this. “For the most part they like the dancing because it gives them the chance to move around,” she said of her students. “Some are embarrassed because they don’t want people to see them, but all participate in one way or another.”
Yuré said that student hesitation does not necessarily mean they are embarrassed. “I think they sometimes they hesitate because they are apprehensive about being free,” she explained.
Bethune said that though the exercises are good therapy, that isn’t the criteria of the program. “It says to these kids they have a right to this voice,” she said.
Bringing Infinite Dreams to schools
Infinite Dreams came to Loma Alta for the first time in 2006. Bethune said she really enjoyed the students there, and after receiving a $40,000 block grant from the City of Los Angeles, was able to come back to Loma Alta and Elliot schools in Pasadena.
Infinite Dreams is hoping for more city-backed grants so they can reach even more children in Pasadena and other cities.
Involvement
Schob said that she hopes soon other Loma Alta classes will be able to take part in this special dance class. “[Lila] is now trying to get her class comfortable and hopes to invite other classes in to partner up with her students,” she said.
The students have worked with the fifth and fourth grades during social studies and science classes, Yuré said. “I think they will invite their best buds, the fifth graders, to come and join their class first,” she said of the dance class.
Since the Infinite Dreams program is so new with these students’ parents, Schob said most of the parents don’t have a good understanding of the program. “Parents this year just found out about the grant [and the program].” She said she has tried to keep them informed of the program. “They love that they have this chance,” she said.
The class will demonstrate their skills at Loma Alta’s Open House on May 20. “We will have a small presentation … to show the parents what they’ve learned,” Schob said.
The results
Until then, the class will continue hopping, twirling and confirming their abilities. “Dancing makes me happy,” Nushin said of the class.
Schob is excited that a program like Infinite Dreams has reached her school and will be able to reach many students. “It’s an opportunity for them to participate in something they wouldn’t normally be able to,” she said.
And her students feel the same. “Dance is powerful,” David said during his lunch break. “We have a lot of fun.”
Infinite Dreams seems more finite in the wake of the weakening economy
The state of the economy has people thinking about the increasing unemployment rate, failing industries and an overwhelming deficit. But people aren’t paying as much attention to the little—but necessary things—such as after school programs. As national, state and city funding for such programs declines, more and more children are missing out on programs designed to give them a better quality of life, especially in regards to the arts.
Bethune Theatredanse and Infinite Dreams are no different.
Zina Bethune, director of Bethune Theatredanse, a non-profit organization that brings drama and dance classes to physically and mentally handicapped children in the Los Angeles and Orange counties, says that the state of the economy may cause serious problems for the company.
Though Bethune Theatredanse has not felt the effects of the economy yet and has not had to decrease the number of schools it teaches classes at—seven in Los Angeles, two in Pasadena and one in Anaheim—Bethune worries about what lies ahead.
Bethune Theatredanse relies heavily on federal and national endowment grants, state grants from the California Arts Council and city grants to operate. However, Bethune said that new funds are not being granted. “The reason [the economy hasn’t hit us yet] is a lot of the grants we are running on are two-year grants, o 2007-2009,” she explained. “So we’re basically finishing off some of the grants we already had in existence.”
In addition to the cessation of funds through grants, Bethune says the $100,000 city grant that was a major factor in bringing Infinite Dreams to schools across Los Angeles is in jeopardy. “[Mayor] Antonio Villaraigosa is trying to do away with the administrative department of many of these grants and reallocate funds towards gang prevention,” she explained.
“Though that’s a worthy thing to allocate funds towards,” she continued, “if your not allocating funds to any kind of school or afterschool programs that deal with some of the problems that these kids have, then you’re not doing anything preventatively in terms of gangs.”
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Bethune said that while the organization is working on finding alternative funding methods, the non-profit organization rely on gifts and donations, to supplement the grants it receives. The 2008 fiscal year, however, proved to not meet expectations.
“We didn’t raise as much money in 2008 as we thought we would, as we expected to, and I think the same thing will happen in 2009,” she said. “What we are trying to do, really, is upon up some new sources, in terms of funding. And that’s hard. Everyone is having to do that in the non-profit world.”
Bethune noted that while other companies are moving forward with cutting expenses and laying off employees, Bethune Theatredanse is waiting to see what the possibilities are for the organizations next step. “We can’t determine where or how to downsize until we know exactly how much those grants will be, or if they are going to be at all,” she said.
Bethune said the worst-case scenario for Bethune Theaterdanse would be cutting classes at sites across Los Angeles. “We are just praying we can just hold where we are,” Bethune said. “If I can hold, us where we are for the next year r so, we have a chance of surviving this.”
Bethune said the most distressing part about losing funding is that many of the children who have been involved in the program for years—and even those who are just becoming involved—will lose access to a “quality of life program.”
“These things [are meant] to empower them and make them realize that they can be part of a working force, they can be part of society,” she said. “If they get to be teenagers [and do not realize their potential], you’ve already lost them. It’s hard to get them back, and that’s what worries me. It really does.”
