The Dance Studio Podcast
The Dance Studio Podcast
American Ballet Theater Master Teacher-Raymond Lukens
Join Sally as she talks with ballet master Raymond Lukens, the driving force behind the American Ballet Theater National Training Curriculum. This episode promises to leave you feeling inspired and enlightened.
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Welcome to the second season of the Dance Studio podcast. This podcast is for dancers, teachers, dance moms and especially dance studio owners. In the first season, we covered topics like scoliosis, eating disorders and point shoe readiness, along with several episodes on different dance career paths and awesome dance programs for you and your dance students. In the second season, you can count on hearing from Tony Award winners, american Ballet Theater teachers, competition judges and so much more. The Dance Studio podcast fans are loving the information this podcast provides. Take it from season one guest, jennifer Miletto.
Speaker 2:My name is Jen Miletto and I am a former student of Sally's, now dancing professionally at Disney. As well as teaching dance as a college professor, Sally has been my mentor through my entire dance career. What I love about her and her podcast is that she is not only willing to be completely open about everything that she has learned in her career, but she is also so curious about what others have learned in their unique experience, and she wants to share all of it with her listeners. There is a reason why I have stuck with Sally all of these years she is committed to advocating for the success of the dance community. If you are a studio owner, teacher, dancer or aspiring to be any of those things, do not miss this podcast.
Speaker 1:Welcome Dance Studio owners. Today, it is a great honor for me to introduce ballet master Raymond Lukens of the American Ballet Theater to you. Welcome, raymond. Thank you for having me. I'm so grateful that you're here Today. We'll be talking about the American Ballet Theater National Training Curriculum, and there's nobody better to discuss this with us than the creator himself. Raymond, tell us a little bit about how you got started dancing and how you transitioned into teaching.
Speaker 3:I started dancing quite late. I was doing acrobatics first and acrobatics teacher said I had to take ballet and I ended up going into the School of American Ballet Theater when I was 15 years old. Then I studied a lot with Richard Thomas and Barbara Phallis. After a couple of years in the school I was offered a position as a trainee for the Harkness Ballet. From there I went to a company formed in Buffalo by Kathleen Crofton and we toured Europe with Nureyev with that company. I got job offers in Europe and touring all over. I lived in Belgium and Germany and France and then finally in Italy. In Italy a woman called Brenda Hamlin. She was a Chiquetti teacher in Florence. She saw me perform and she said I want you to teach. I said I don't teach, I don't know anything about teaching. She said I insist, I want you to teach. I went and started teaching for her and I fell in love with teaching.
Speaker 1:Right away.
Speaker 3:Yes, after the first class I loved her first sight, I could say she gave me a group of very, very talented students. There were five girls and two boys, and all but one became professional dancers, which was quite amazing in a private school. Then I was asked to teach young people and I said I don't know what to do. She said well, I'll teach you the Chiquetti program and then you can become certified. She taught me the elementary and intermediate syllabus in a week. I was still in shape so I could do everything quite easily. Then I went to London and got examined by Laura Wilson. Then I got my first Chiquetti qualification and within the arc of three years I got my fellowship.
Speaker 1:How young were the students that she wanted you to teach?
Speaker 3:that when you said, oh, I don't know what to do with them. The youngest ones were about eight 10 years old, but the first group they were the youngest was a 15-year-old, exceedingly talented young woman named Nicoleta Santoro. She's now the director of the Hamlin School in Florence.
Speaker 1:Do you have a level or an age group that you prefer teaching? Do you prefer teaching teachers, students or certain age groups, or do you just love teaching everybody?
Speaker 3:Well, I've taught everything from five-year-olds right up through professional dancers. I've taught the company at ABT in Boston and several of the companies, but I think that my favorite age group is between 15 and 18 years old. Because company dancers you have to consider their work day. They don't want to, not they're necessarily to improve their technique. They're there to maintain their technique and to be prepared for their day's work. It's when they have six hours of rehearsals, it's a lot. So you don't want to kill them in the class, to want them to be on their legs and feel warm and comfortable and ready to go, while the younger groups they don't have those hours of rehearsal. So the work that we do is a lot harder on them so that they Actually get stronger and stronger. And the company dances, of course the repertoire Maintains them strong because when they're rehearsing all those hours and they're doing very difficult ballets, that's already Maintaining or increasing their technique.
Speaker 1:So how did the national training curriculum come about? Was there a need? Was something lacking? Who's idea was it and what was the process?
Speaker 3:It's a long process. Basically it was like three parallel things happening at the same time. When Franko and I took over the school in Florence bring the Hamelin school, we decided that Franco was trained in the Paris opera system and I was trained in New York, so it's the whatever system in New York City, and through our experiences in dancing in the theaters. So we had a lot of Cuban teachers, russian teachers, english teachers and then Learning the Chiquetti work. A lot of it came together and we thought that Chiquetti examinations they were a little bit too binding in the sense that the children didn't get to experience other types of ways of moving, and so we started Creating our own program For the school and then the results were that the Chiquetti students in our school were Doing really, really well.
Speaker 3:In fact, in I think, 15 years we directed the school, we produced 53 professional dancers you know little private school and from their. Kirk Peterson saw the school, came to visit and Kirk and I had been trainees at Harkness together and he was shocked at the level of the school. Then they gave him the directorship, the Hartford Ballet, and he asked me do you still have that memory that you have when you were a dancer? Do you always learned everybody's parts and I said, yeah, I do.
Speaker 3:He said, well, I would like you to be my ballet master and I would like Franco to come and teach at the school. So Franco said let's do it, let's have an American experience. And the Hartford Ballet had already a system in place and we had meetings to alter the system or update it, let's say, and because of we had the private school situation, reality that we knew what it was working with ordinary children too. We said the vast majority of students are not going to be professional dancers. We have to do something that is going to serve all of them. So they agreed and we had the great Russian teacher, great ballerina, to allow. See Panko, who was trained by Barbara Garnova herself and she had worked with us in Florence and then also in Hartford.
Speaker 3:Kirk, with his vast experience as a principal dancer with ABT, and Maria Yuskevich, the daughter of the great Ebro Yuskevich, inet Lin, the founder of the Hartford Ballet, and Peggy Lyman, who was a principal dancer with Martha Graham Company. So we started working on creating a new program and With that program we went to Boston and Boston Ballet asked us to develop a program for them also, and and we started that. And then Rachel Moore, who was the director of the school, became executive director of ABT and by chance, abt had had an artistic retreat in which they had were discussing how do we deal with training dancers. So the dancers are happy and healthy people, and so Kirk Peterson, who was part of the at that time ballet master for ABT, said we have to recruit Frank Conreiman for this. So we started and basically what had started in our school in Florence then slowly developed into what became the ABT curriculum. There were a lot of people around us. Kevin McKenzie was fantastic in supporting us and that was basically how it started.
Speaker 1:When the goal is to create happy, healthy dancers who are well-trained. You've got a great goal in front of you.
Speaker 3:Well, the priority is always the well-being of the person.
Speaker 1:Yes, and you've really done that. In my opinion, with that, the national training curriculum, it really takes care of the student and I appreciate that. Do you wanna talk about the NYU program?
Speaker 3:Because Hartford was tied to the Hart School in Hartford. So there was always that university connection and I had written the syllabi for the Hart School program. And then when we went to Boston, boston had a connection with Harvard and Franco went and taught us a guest teacher at Harvard University. And then with Alvin Ailey we had the Fordham University connection. When we went to ABT we said it just makes sense to have a connection with an important university because that actually renders the whole thing more legitimate and we have this backing of academia. So why don't we propose a master's degree program in ABT ballet pedagogy? And we had the meeting with NYU. Nyu then said to me Franco and me to write a syllabus. Franco said no, I'm too busy with the school. You write the syllabus.
Speaker 3:So I wrote the syllabus thinking that it would be gonna take two years for it to be approved. So I wrote the syllabus about five weeks afterwards we received that the university had approved it, but we had to get the state of New York's approval. Luckily our head of education and training at ABT at the time was Mary Jo Ciesel and she said well, when you're writing the syllabus, let me call somebody who was in the committee in the New York state to make sure that all the points are covered, and that was fantastic. So I had these meetings with this wonderful person and in December they said it's been approved by the state and the university said we're scrambling now because it usually takes a year and they approved it in three months. So you've covered all the bases and we have to start in, you know, just in a few months to get the program going. So that's how it started.
Speaker 1:My student, Lillian Chong, just graduated from the program. She's very happy.
Speaker 3:I examined her. I remember.
Speaker 1:Our studio uses Akata software and we absolutely love it. If you want to take control of everything from employees to parents, costume ordering to registration, try Akata today. If you don't love it, they won't charge you a thing. Go to akatasoftwarecom a-k-a-d-a-softwarecom to inquire about your free trial today. So what advice would you give a young dancer today who's hoping to become a professional?
Speaker 3:There are several things to be considered. The professional has to look at himself in a very honest way. So what is my talent? What do I have? Do I have the right kind of body? Do I have the right kind of natural coordination? Do I have that's something that nobody can teach that talent? I think that if you don't have the right body and if you do not have the right coordination, but you have the intellect and you have that something special inside that can be taught, you should study anyway, because you could become a wonderful teacher, you could become a wonderful choreographer, you could become associated in a dance field in many, many, many different ways.
Speaker 3:And a lot of our people in the office at ABT are people who want to be dancers and just they didn't have all those prerequisites but they still love it and they're involved with the National Company of America, so it's very gratifying for them. Our stage manager in Boston she wanted to be a dancer but her coordination was not right for it and she's now the principal stage manager of the Boston Ballet. So there's lots of opportunities. Two of the greatest teachers in the United States that we know of, who produce hundreds of dancers, have become even famous. Principal dancers were never dancers. And I'm thinking of our dear friend Susan Brooker, who's now the director of the ABT school in California, that William and Jake Gillespie School at the Siegfriedsturm Center. She was never a dancer and she has been an incredible teacher who produced so many people and teachers and dancers throughout the world.
Speaker 3:So you should go with it because you love it and you should not blame yourself or anybody if you don't have the body to do it or you don't have the natural coordination to do it. To do many pirouettes, that's a natural gift. There are lots of things that are natural gifts and you can't really change that. That's genetically pre-programmed in our bodies. But if you have the intellect and you have the soul of the dancer, you could become of great value for the art form.
Speaker 1:I love that advice. What advice would you give dance teachers, dance studio owners all over the world? What would you hope that they are conveying to their students?
Speaker 3:Well, first of all, they have to have a premise and that is that their priority has to always be the wellbeing of their students. That is number one. They have to be honest with the students, tell them exactly what they see and what they feel. And sometimes there's nothing more gratifying than when you've given advice to the student, where you say, well, you know you may not make it, et cetera, and then they prove you wrong. There's no greater source of joy than that. When you've been proven wrong that way, that's a good thing. So never to be afraid to be honest, but always to be caring, to show that you care and that they understand that you are there for them.
Speaker 1:Very good advice. This podcast I started because I want to give all dance teachers everywhere especially young dance teachers who might be intimidated by things like the American Ballet Theater Teacher Training Curriculum a window into how it works and how not to be intimidated by it. So can you talk about a person who's, let's just say, 23 and lives in Wisconsin and has done a lot of ballet but really doesn't know how to go about having a big ballet program at their studio? Why shouldn't they be intimidated to get the training that ABT offers?
Speaker 3:There's reason to be intimidated and there's reason not to be intimidated. If you're honest with yourself as a teacher and you do have the training and you do have a certain technical ability, then you shouldn't be intimidated at all. If you are basically just starting and your own technique is I don't know, let's say of Chiquetti Grade II, for example, then it is intimidating because the course is so intense and so short, there's so much information given in such a short time and that maybe you should go back and make sure that your own training is more solid before you attempt to do it. Why you shouldn't be intimidated if you have a solid training? That's kind of difficult because people have different personalities, like those people that have stage fright. We've known fantastic dancers in the studio and they get on stage. They fall apart. So it's kind of an individual thing. But what we're offering that is maybe a little different is that we're offering a way of thinking for yourself on how to correct the dancer, how to identify the faults and identify what's causing that fault and to correct them with a plan B. That is another exercise, without having to repeat with words, a thousand correct, the same correction and then teachers start sounding like adults due to Charlie Brown, you know they wah, wah, wah, so that the students aren't here anymore. So we want to help teachers become more effective in their approach to teaching and we're not stylistically bound to any system.
Speaker 3:And that was done on purpose, because ABT needed dancers to be able to jump from Tudor to Petipa, to Ashton, to Twilithar, to Martha Graham. So we had to be stylistically neutral but use the information that we got from the great masters of the past the old French school, the Chiquetti school, the Vaganova school, the Bournembeal school. So we were taking information that's coming from those great masters who, by the way, admired each other. We know that Chiquetti was a great admirer of Bournembeal predecessor and of Blasie's. We know that Vaganova was a great admirer of Johansson, who was the Danish teacher in St Petersburg, and of Chiquetti. So there was no sense of rivalry, there was a sense of learning from each other, and so we took that idea to put it into the program. So not to be intimidated, okay, so to answer that question, I would lie if I said it's not intimidating. It is intimidating.
Speaker 1:But I like what you said about getting more technical training. For me I had done all the way through the advanced Chiquetti program and so when I got to the American Ballet Theater training program I was very comfortable there. So what kinds of training would you recommend somebody do, maybe before they come, if they're not up to snuff technically?
Speaker 3:If people do not have training and of course they have to have had, like you did, go through a program. We recommend any program that is good for them. If they are near a Chiquetti teacher, it's very good to go through that program. If they're near an RAD teacher, that's very good if they go through that program. If they follow any kind of sort of systematized program with a school, if they have a good Faganova teacher, if they have, it doesn't really matter which system they do, as long as that they have a solid technical base.
Speaker 3:Now we've had some problems with some people who did dancing as a hobby and never really achieved a very high level. Then they retire from whatever job they did and says oh, I want to do this because now I want to be a teacher. That's not really the right person to try and do this because it is just overwhelming. Point Magazine or Dance Magazine one of the editors decided to do the program. She was a dancer and she had a high level and she wrote a whole article on it. I don't know if you saw this.
Speaker 1:I didn't see it.
Speaker 3:Of her experience doing and she said my experience it was like drinking water out of a fire hose, because the amount of information is so overwhelming. So if you don't have enough training it becomes really, really difficult. But if you do, I think everybody who's done it, who has the training, they've enjoyed it. They keep coming back to audit and watch it and see other people go through it.
Speaker 1:I loved it. It was such a great program and I did come back to audit and I can't say enough good things about it. It was fantastic and I had the total joy of having you and Franco as teachers and other great teachers and I just loved every single minute of it. It's a gift that you've given all dance teachers everywhere and I appreciate it. This episode is brought to you by Mix Tape Studios, a full-service recording studio online at mynewmixtapecom, a one-stop shop for all your recital and competition music editing needs. What didn't I ask you that you would like dance teachers to know about the curriculum, or about ABT, or about you?
Speaker 3:Right now ABT is asking us to do a lot of work. So we've been teaching and traveling around the world teaching the curriculum. This coming year we have about 10 programs coming which will be done around the world. We are quite busy. If teachers want a master class, they usually is better if they go through ABT because it's a master calendar and I just don't want to book myself and they say, oops, I can't do it. But if they do like to do that, they can always send an email and then we could look at it and hope that we could accommodate. But we are really really busy. Both Franco and I are crazy busy.
Speaker 1:Good they're using you as much as they can. I'm glad you're willing to be so generous with your knowledge and you're such kind teachers. I'm glad that you're still out there doing it. How can people follow you if they want to just see what you're up to?
Speaker 3:They can follow me on Facebook or through the ABT website. You can see what's going on.
Speaker 1:My final question that I ask every dance teacher is what is your number one teacher tip trick that you keep in your back pocket, that you just couldn't live without One? You can do three. You can do as many as you want. We'll take as much sharing as you want to give us.
Speaker 3:The first tip is not to assume that you know everything so that when you give a correction, make sure that it's just a diagnosis, like when you go to the doctor you get a second opinion, you have to go to another doctor so you may have misdiagnosed. So it's just stay humble that way. That's a very important tip. Another one is not to assume that students are stupid. Sometimes their body-brain connection is not set up to really understand their body, understand what you're telling them verbally. They have to retrain a muscle. Memory is creating that automatic response of the students. And that's why avoiding thinking they are stupid because I don't believe that anybody goes in to do anything to fail. I don't think you're going to sign into medical school to be the worst doctor in the world. So any person tries to do something, you have to believe that they want to do it as well as they can. The third thing is to always be kind.
Speaker 3:When I was a student we were taught that you had to be put down so you build yourself up. And Monica Mason, who directed the Royal Ballet School for so long and she was trained in South Africa and she was a little girl, she said I'm going to quit dancing. I can't do this. And then she found her mother, found this teacher and Ruth Ingolstein. I'll never forget this lady. And Monica said Ruth was the kindest person in the world and I am where I am because she was so kind. Then she became, of course, a star of the Royal Ballet Company and then director of the Royal Ballet Company. You see, kindness really does pay off.
Speaker 1:If we all did everything from a place of kindness, the whole world would be a much better place. I think that's the best place to leave this podcast. Raymond, you have been so kind to do this podcast and your generosity with your time. But taking your classes over the years, I've been so impressed with your kindness over and over again. So you learned that lesson and I hope that we can all learn that lesson from you. So thank you so much for doing this today.
Speaker 3:Thank, you for having me. It's an honor.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening and don't forget. Please rate and review this show and share it with a friend.