CARE Ballet prepares for 25th season of caring
The local dance organization takes their work beyond teaching dance technique to also teach technical staging skills, impart life skills, and encourage its artists to look beyond their own self-interests toward the aiding and enriching of the lives of others.
What’s in a name? You need only look at the name of Grand Rapid’s organization CARE Ballet to get the sense that they are not your average ballet conservatory and performing arts ensemble. An acronym for Creative Arts Repertoire Ensemble, CARE is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting dance in West Michigan. But teaching students dance technique and giving them performance opportunities is only part of what CARE does for young artists. In addition, CARE teaches them technical staging skills, imparts life skills, and encourages its artists to look beyond their own self-interests toward the aiding and enriching of the lives of others.
Now celebrating its 25th anniversary season, CARE was founded in 1992 by artistic director Judy Genson-Wadsworth, a former dancer with Grand Rapids Civic Ballet, along with her husband and technical director Trent Wadsworth and stage manager Robin Kobel.
For its first 14 years, the organization was solely a performance ensemble offering area ballet students stage experience in a variety of one-hour classical story and classic children’s story ballet productions. In 2006, CARE Conservatory of Ballet (CCB) was founded to train school-age students in classical ballet. CCB’s ballet classes are based on the ballet training method of Italian dancer and ballet master Enrico Cecchetti (1850–1928) of Ballets Russes fame.
CCB now offers instruction for dancers ages 3-adult and includes classes in pilates, yoga, jazz, tap, and musical theater.
“Over the 25 years of CARE and over the 50 years I have been in dance, there is so much new information on how a dancer should be trained,” says Genson-Wadsworth.
Genson-Wadsworth says that over the past 25 years she and her staff have worked to keep up with current teaching trends and cross-training methods to help their students to become better dancers and to build strength and stamina to dance longer. She noted that back when she was a dancer in the 1970s and 80s, athletic training outside of dance ─ other than swimming which was considered less hard on the joints ─ was frowned upon for fear of injury. “That’s all changed,” she says.
The idea of exposing CARE’s young artists to more than just dance training and performing came early in its history, with teaching them about what goes on behind the scenes of the ballet productions they were in.
“That’s a really cool part of what we do,” says Genson-Wadsworth. “We educate them not only in dance but in other areas of the theater.”
The students learn about lighting, sound, and the other aspects of a stage production and the duties of stage crew members. In addition, they are expected to pitch in after productions to take down sets, roll up the portable dance floor, and other duties. These activities not only teach young dancers theater production skills they might use later on in life, but also teach them about teamwork and responsibility, says Genson-Wadsworth. As well, she says, it’s teaching them to respect those who work in support of their art and not take them for granted.
These are lessons Broadway actor/dancer and East Grand Rapids native Johnny Stellard says he took to heart while participating in CARE’s productions from 1996–2006.
“The first and foremost thing that comes to mind was learning to have respect for one another, to work as a team and really care about, support and lift each other up,” Stellard says about his time at CARE.
Currently a cast member of the Broadway musical “Anastasia,” Stellard says at a young age he was taken to CARE’s productions and was thrilled as a grade-schooler to be asked to be in one. His first production he says “was the first time I was bitten by the performing bug.”
Later when Genson-Wadsworth introduced him to musical theater by encouraging him to try out for a Grand Rapids Civic Theatre & School of Theatre Arts’ production of “Scrooge: The Musical” she was choreographing, he says he got bit harder.
“CARE was a really guiding part of my life,” says Stellard. “It totally shaped my path and gave me opportunities to figure out what I wanted to do and also the confidence to pursue it.”
Another important aspect to CARE’s philosophy of developing the “whole person” is teaching its dancers about giving back to the community and to those less fortunate through CARE’s outreach programs.
One such program is their School Performance Program that introduces classical ballet to underserved students in the Greater Grand Rapids area. Before each of CARE’s productions open, the organization sends out an education specialist and one or two CARE cast members to visit area schools to summarize the upcoming ballet’s story, talk about the ballet’s choreography, and how dance is different from other art forms in telling stories. They also introduce students to the ballet’s music, talk about proper theater etiquette, and what to expect at a ballet performance. All this is in preparation of having these students (some 1200 on average) attend a dress rehearsal of a CARE Ballet production.
“CARE became kind of a mentoring system with the older dancers taking the younger ones under their wings,” says Genson-Wadsworth about this by-product of fostering a culture of giving back. The more experienced students took it upon themselves to show younger dancers and those new to CARE the ropes, such as helping them with their dance steps, making sure before performances that their shoes were tied, their hair was done properly, their costume was in order, etc. Those students then learned how to be a mentor to others, perpetuating the mentoring system so that now students consider it an honor to mentor others.
Genson-Wadsworth says she never assigned students to mentor others but that it happened organically. Older students saw a need during CARE’s large cast productions (typically over 60 performers) and stepped in to help. Since the unofficial mentoring program started, Genson-Wadsworth says over the years she and her staff have monitored it and made suggestions to the students on how to be better mentors.
So how has this unconventional approach, being more than a dance organization that just teaches and promotes dance, worked? Genson-Wadsworth says the reports back from former students like Stellard and several others currently in Broadway productions and working in other professions show it has been a success. These former students tell her their time at CARE gave them added skills and a humanitarian mindset that has served them well in their careers.
For the 67-year-old Genson-Wadsworth, whose vision has guided CARE for the past quarter century, this anniversary year will be her last as its director. She plans to still teach at CARE and will continue to mentor her replacement, Heather Liskiewitz, a former CARE student who is currently CCB’s ballet mistress and costume seamstress.
CARE opens its 2017–18 season with a reprise of Genson-Wadsworth’s condensed, hourlong production of “Sleeping Beauty.” Set to Tchaikovsky’s music for the ballet, the production runs Saturday, October 7 at 11 a.m. & 3 p.m. and Sunday, October 8 at 3 p.m. at East Grand Rapids Performing Arts Center. “Sleeping Beauty” will not only entertain audiences with its retelling of Charles Perrault’s classic tale, but exercise all those added elements that make CARE a place of caring.
For more information about CARE visit careballet.org.
