MIAMI (CBSMiami) – A category of younger aspiring ballerinas is below the watchful eye of Ruth Wiesen, the chief director of Armour Dance Theater in South Miami.
She watches them follow their sleek strikes. Whether bodily at school, at residence just about, or throughout the county within the satellite tv for pc packages, all of the dancers are below the watch of Wiesen.
“The mission of Armour Dance is to use dance to give children across our entire community more opportunity and to open avenues of choice that were not previously open to them before,” Wiesen defined.
In the Nineteen Eighties, Wiesen was a instructor at what’s Miami’s oldest youth dance college, Thomas Armour Youth Ballet.
Wiesen, together with a bunch of dancers, offered a lecture to college students in Carol City and had an eye-opening interplay.
“At the end, a little girl came up and said, ‘I just love ballet!’ she just gushed. And I asked her ‘Do you take classes?’ and she laughed and said. ‘No, only white girls are allowed’,” she recalled.
At about the identical time, the New World School of the Arts High School opened.
“The kids in the magnet programs who have enough money to get classes after school were the ones who were competitive, so it was a very uneven playing field,” she mentioned.
Wiesen seized the possibility to make a distinction. She approached her boss – world-renowned dancer Thomas Armour – and advised him there was room to deliver youngsters from throughout with a scholarship.
“He later told me that he said ‘okay’ because he thought I would fail and he wanted me out of his office,” Wiesen laughed, including he later grew to become an enormous proponent of this system.
The scholarship program she devised is succeeding via outreach to underserved neighborhoods.
“Our four sites are Morningside, Miami Gardens, Frances Tucker, R.R. Moten elementary schools. And this summer, we will be at Pine Villa Elementary doing summer camp,” mentioned Wiesen.
The after-school program, funded via the Children’s Trust and different endowments, supplies instruction past the ballet.
“We also give them reading with a literacy specialist, we give them math for an hour with the math teacher, we give them snacks and art classes, it’s a great program. For the sixth graders, we make sure that they’re ready to audition for those magnet programs,” mentioned Wiesen.
There are success tales of students in lots of fields who went on to varsity, together with dance, like Christopher Rudd.
Rudd met Wiesen as a fourth-grader in Perrine. He entered this system and at age 11 grew to become the primary Black little one to bop the title function in George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker.
Rudd has since carried out everywhere in the world and opened his personal dance firm in New York, RudduR Dance.
He cannot say sufficient concerning the alternative he was supplied and about Wiesen’s influence on his life.
“Ruth didn’t just become my teacher, she became my second mother and my biggest champion,” he mentioned, including that “the discipline that they instill in us is used through all walks of life.”
Wiesen is busier than ever, maintaining this system funded and working, and educating lessons. But she by no means loses sight of the mission.
“Any child that goes to The Nutcracker should be able to look upon the stage and see somebody that looks like them, from the smallest part to the principal roles.”
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