Natasha Brooksher		Joshua Brooksher

Natasha: We met in 1996 at the New York International Ballet Competition. I competed there in '93 and had been invited back by Ilona Copen as a guest artist for the Gala, and Josh was competing as a partner for a young lady from Long Island. After that, he found out I was dancing in Boston and moved there so we could be together. We got married a year-and-a-half later.
 
Josh: We got to thinking about teaching toward the end of our performing careers, and seemed to be migrating West. We were living out here in Phoenix already, dancing with Ballet Arizona. By the time you get to be 14 or 15, if you live in this area it is hard to find a school solely dedicated to or even capable of training professionals on a consistent basis. We just didn't think that was fair. So rather than go somewhere else, we thought, "Why not make a place here?" So in January 2003 we founded what became Southwest Classical Dance Institute.
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Josh: A lot of students have taken what they would call a "ballet" class, which is usually 45 minutes to an hour and given in combination with something else. They've decided they don't like it because it wasn't as exciting. But as soon as they take a real class and there are enormous challenges placed in front of them — things for them to constantly be thinking about and trying to do better — they suddenly love it.
 
Natasha: Out here, in the West, we seem to be in a little bit of a cultural vacuum. Anyone trying to do what we're trying to do is essentially a pioneer. With the popularity of the dance-sport competition out here and over 700 dance-sport competition schools in the Phoenix area alone, it can be a bit of an uphill battle.
 
Josh: I don't know how many times I've said in a master class "dance is not a sport". But I have been argued with on every occasion. Lots of people come into the school and say, "But you don't have any trophies."
 
Natasha: We are finding that the schools focusing primarily on classical ballet have kind of given up, actually. They do a certain amount, they do it to a certain level, but beyond that…
 
Josh: It comes to a point where an executive director of an organization says, "This just doesn't make good business sense."
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Josh: We have our professional and recreational programs. There are benefits that arts can bring to young people, whether or not they plan to be professional artists. So rather than offer just a professional program, which was the idea behind founding the school, we are also trying to develop an appreciation for the arts through a recreational program. It allows kids to take 1, 2, 3 classes a week to get some exposure to what it’s about — the physicality of it — develop an appreciation for that, because in ten years they will be the audience for the artists we train. We also do outreach to other dance schools and send our faculty members to go and teach master classes. Right now there two schools where SCDI faculty teach on a regular basis.
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Natasha: We go up to Prescott, about an hour-and-a-half north of Phoenix, during the hot summer months. It's mostly to expose kids nationally to what we are trying to do at our school, and get the word out on a broader basis about the more fundamental aspects of basic training, essentially. A lot of children discover their love of ballet and have a real awakening to the possibilities for their dance endeavors through classical ballet training.
 
Josh: We've been trying to bring in guest faculty every year. The first year, Rasta Thomas came and taught for a week.
 
Natasha: Adrienne Canterna came with him. We also had Zachary Hench and Julie Diana come in from the San Francisco Ballet.
 
Josh: Zachary Hench was a classmate of mine from Universal Ballet Academy. Now, The Kirov Academy.
 
Natasha: The second year we had Dmitri Roudnev come in. We also had Olga Tarasova, who was a principal dancer with Kiev Classical Ballet. She is local to this area at this time. She came up with us. And we also brought in Alexandra Koltun and Alex Lapshin, who are currently dancing with San Jose Ballet in California. We've had quite a reputable staff in the past. We have Madame Tarasova coming back again, and we also have Anastasia Prokofieva and her husband, Vitaly Bursenko, both formerly of the Bolshoi Ballet, coming for our summer program for the ballet and character classes. We really try to reach out to the people of the highest caliber in the dance community who have the same training background as we do.
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Josh: Often we see fine professionals teaching not what they know but what they think Natasha and I as Americans want to see. So I hold a daily faculty meeting for the first three days to explain that it is absolutely okay if they go ahead and really teach. They’ve been — for however long they've been in the States — restraining themselves for fear of offending anyone.
 
Natasha: Some of it has to do with glossing over important details, through the training process, not taking enough time to make corrections properly, and make them do it again and again until it is done correctly. Because, you know, kids get frustrated, and then they go home and get frustrated with their parents and you know what happens.
 
Josh: When the parent feels that they are a consumer, they would like to purchase something and have the results quickly and efficiently and be done with it. They expect to pull up to the drive-through window, order up a ballerina, and she'll be at the second window waiting when they hand over their money. So it is a difficult thing. I had a very interesting discussion with one of our guest faculty. He said he was struggling and struggling to find a shortcut to the technique. I told him, "Stop trying to find a shortcut. You don't have to look for a shortcut here. The kids want to know the details."
 
Natasha: This is why they came to our summer programs; this is what they were expecting.
 
Josh: So, that is the struggle we go through with finding our faculty. It usually takes a little bit of time. Some people who have come and taught for us one or two times don't come back just because they've basically given up on it. Beyond that, there seems to be a widespread pandemic of what I call "The 1970s Misguided Ballet Technique." I don't know where it came from. I've tried to trace back some of the misappropriation of words — for instance, the transition of the word coupe to mean a position instead a movement.
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Josh: There is one methodology that I have found supports the widest variety of expression. I've seen dancers from one technique and dancers from another technique. I've learned as much as I can about other techniques without actually studying them for the allotted time period. I have found that most often dancers trained in the Vaganova Method — even if they are not dancing that way now — can dance a number of styles, create a number of different movement qualities and still return and dance Swan Lake or Sleeping Beauty like a classical dancer. I'm a bit biased. This is how I was taught, how I danced. This is how Natasha was taught, and how she danced. In order for us to be effective and true in our teaching, we have to teach what we were taught. Teachers must teach a proven method. By that I mean not an old method that is 250 years old, or however old. I mean a method that was taught to them originally, that they have taken out into the world and developed through their experiences as a dancer, as an artist. Their burden is then to take this tested method and teach it to the next generation. The only way I see that this art form can grow is through this process of — teacher trains student, student grows into an artist, artist experiences and develops the technique, and then becomes a teacher and trains the next generation. Otherwise our technique and our artistry become stagnant.
 
Natasha: In the same sense you have to have extensive knowledge and experience in order to do that. We find that a lot of teachers, especially out in this area, seem to have developed ideas about turnout, for example, that have not been developed properly. Essentially they are trying to experiment with these ideas on their students.
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Josh: "Vaganova Method" today is a very hot-button phrase. Everyone is saying they teach "Vaganova" and the name gets thrown around lightly. I think the only way to find out if they really do is to watch a class, find out who their teacher was, how their lineage in some way or another links them to the Vaganova Choreographic Institute. My principal teacher, was Rudolf Kharatian. He's a graduate of the Vaganova Choreographic Institute and his teacher was Alexander Pushkin. So while I didn't attend the Vaganova School, I studied with a teacher who did, and have a direct lineage to that school. I don't teach the same way that my teacher was taught. But through this lineage we can see that it came from this, and has developed through the process I described earlier to what it is now. Without that it is just a random mishmash of steps and things that someone has learned, which in some techniques are contradictory.
 
Natasha: And that is also how you can tell whose class a student came from. The teacher has a certain stamp they put on their students, and you can trace that. This was Kostrovitskaya's student, or this was Vaganova's student. You can tell that by how they dance, how they were trained.
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Natasha: The training that I got was from Ms. Sharon Dante. She used to hold teachers courses every summer and we would be her demonstrators for hours and hours of teacher lectures. We had theory classes and took notes and through that got very deep, very detailed explanations of the pedagogy and the process by which a step is broken down and taught… the different stages of a step as it is developed from the most basic forms at the barre to center to its ultimate expression in allegro.
 
Josh: When I was in school we did our regular class, and we would spend weekends at Mr. Kharatian's house studying the development of the technique, the development of a dancer, what we can expect to see in our bodies. We would watch the younger students as we came close to graduation. When we were off we would watch the younger students' classes with him and he would discuss things we could expect to see throughout the course of the year as far as the way their bodies would change, the way their thinking would change about what they were doing, and we asked a lot of questions. We were encouraged constantly to ask questions. So when I was in school I was trained pedagogically… and continue to be.
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Josh: We rely extensively on our teachers. I talk to my teacher as often as I can about technique. If I run into a problem that I just can't solve, I call him or send an email. I try to get out there as often as possible and have dinner with him. One of the things he emphasized was the three reasons behind every movement: You must have a technical, aesthetic, and philosophical reason for each thing you are doing. As I get older the philosophical part is much more interesting. When I was 14 I just wanted to do more pirouettes! He always spent a great deal of time with us, and we had an unspoken agreement that we would all teach what we were taught. It is a burden that was placed on us.
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Josh: We use Vaganova's Basic Principles of Classical Ballet. I read Russian, so I have the original Russian text and I have the pink book, the translated version, for Natasha. We also use Nikolai Tarasov's Ballet Technique for the Male Dancer and Kostrovitskaya's 100 Lessons in Classical Ballet. I have a number of pamphlets from different teaching programs friends of mine hold, or have attended. Carol Roderick developed a syllabus with Jurgen Schneider (*Please see note of clarification at the end of this article.*), in which she has gone through a tedious process of writing down and cataloguing the various developmental processes. She has been kind enough to go through some of that with us. Some of it I agree with and some I don't. Our students have a theory class and twice a year they take exams.
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Josh: Absolutely. You meet someone else who is trying to do what you're doing, facing the same challenges, and you just kind of gravitate to them. So that develops a personal relationship and I have always found that the best professional relationships are based on good personal ones. Every class member that I graduated with became a professional dancer and now they are all becoming teachers. So we kind of have a network. And we're always expanding it. When we invite teachers to teach and find that we're all teaching the same thing, it is amazing how we gravitate to one another. Kind of like a group of persecuted individuals grouping together to struggle and try and survive!
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Josh: It seems to me what everyone is looking for is some effective way to license qualified teachers. The establishment of organizations like CDA is essential to the next generation professional dancers.
 
Natasha: I think there is a huge gap in the quality of dance education of the United States in general, in comparison to what is available internationally. It is very difficult, I am finding, to open our students' viewpoint to that international arena, and getting them to understand that the standards are actually not just what they see locally, but what is required of them internationally.
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Note of Clarification: Carol Roderick studied with Jurgen Schneider during his summer courses held at Western Michigan University and at Colorado Women’s College. Ms. Roderick did develop her own syllabus but not in association with Jurgen Schneider. Jurgen Schneider worked for 15 years with Janina Cunova to develop the program he taught in many venues.

Learn more about the Brookshers, their program, and the Southwest Classical Dance Institute at:
www.swcdi.com.