May 7, 2009 | Read Time: 1 minute
When Pierre Dulaine was 13, his family moved from Jordan to England, a difficult transition for a shy boy with a broken front tooth. One day, however, a friend said, “Let’s go dancing,” and that first dance lesson in 1958 not only bolstered Pierre’s self-confidence immeasurably, but also led to a career as a ballroom dancer and dance instructor.
While Mr. Dulaine was performing on Broadway in 1994, he had his days free, so he volunteered to teach a dance class at Manhattan’s Professional Performing Arts School. That modest beginning quickly led to the creation of Dancing Classrooms, a 10-week curriculum that now reaches some 30,000 students at 240 inner-city schools in New York (some of whom are shown here), as well as in Fort Worth, Omaha, and several other cities.
Mr. Dulaine, the program’s executive director, says Dancing Classrooms teaches students far more than the mechanics of the merengue, tango, or waltz. Ballroom dance is merely a medium, he says, through which the youngsters – mostly fifth graders – can transcend social barriers, learn important communication skills, and gain increased respect for themselves and others.
This year’s operating budget had been $3-million, but was pared to $2.6-million due to school-budget problems. (Fifty-five percent of the program’s revenue comes from schools, 16 percent from foundations, and the remainder from fund-raising events and other sources.)
Even though the recession makes growth more challenging, Mr. Dulaine plans to expand Dancing Classrooms, which was featured in the 2005 documentary Mad Hot Ballroom, to more cities in the United States and overseas.
“Now if only the politicians would dance with each other, because body language does not lie,” says Mr. Dulaine mischievously. “Those little muscles tell a lot.”
Here, students from PS/IS 323, in Brooklyn, N.Y., show off the moves they have learned.
