For Some Children With Autism, Dance Is a Form of
Expression
“Ballet
incorporates a bit of mime,” Ms. Schlachte said. “When you watch a ballet, you
can see expressions of joy, sadness, fear, excitement and other moods on the
dancers’ faces and in the way they carry their bodies. Kids on the spectrum
can’t always tell if the facial expressions, body movements, and the music are
happy, fearful or sad.”
The program, she
said, “doesn’t dumb anything down. We’re teaching real ballet techniques.”
When Liam Kay of
Los Angeles was 5, he wanted to learn those techniques. He watched a video of
Mikhail Baryshnikov dancing “The Nutcracker” and was hooked.
It took six months
for his mom, Jamie Kay, to find a ballet class for him, because of his autism.
“He joined Ballet for All Kids a month later and hasn’t looked back,” she said.
Liam’s first-grade a teacher told his parents that Liam constantly fell out of his chair in class.
“This stopped about a month after he began class,” Ms. Kay said. “Ballet also
brought forth confidence in him that my husband and I had never seen before.
Liam never thought he was good at anything until after his first year of
ballet. It became a must for him to do.”
He went from one
day to two days a week after school. Now 13, he volunteers with younger
children in tap dance classes, though he prefers ballet.
“He’s made friends
who are both neurodiverse and neurotypical in ballet,” his mom said. “And as an
eighth-grader, this is finally emerging outside of dance. Neurotypical students
are inviting Liam to parties and to hang out at their homes or go to the
movies. All of this truly stems from him dancing with Ballet for All Kids. It’s
the only inclusive environment he has been inconsistent since he was 6.”
Madeleine and Vivienne Bell, 12-year-old
twins with special needs, enrolled in the program at age 3 ½. Madeleine has
autism and a sensory processing disorder. Vivienne has global developmental
delays and is nonverbal. “When they were first diagnosed, my husband and I
thought there may not be any typical opportunities for them and that their
lives would be dominated by therapies,” said their mother, Erin Bell.
02
Dance studio to host the grand opening of the second location in Bethlehem Township on Sunday
A Lehigh Valley
area dance studio is expanding.
Cartesian Dance
Academy, which opened eight years ago at 1505 Route 209 in Brodheadsville, on
Sunday will hold a grand opening of its second dance facility at 1926 Second
St. in Bethlehem Township.
The new, The 12,000-square-foot building features five studios with new Marley vinyl and
spring sub-flooring, made of foam pads and a thin wooden frame under the plywood
allowing the floor to give on impact and sink slightly as the dancer lands from
a jump.
“We’re really
excited,” owner Cinthia Marino said. “The new facility has five studios, so we
can offer a lot more in terms of classes, birthday parties and so on. We’re
very family-oriented.”
Marino, of
Kunkletown has been dancing since she was 2 years old. She took various dance
classes growing up and attended the Lehigh Valley Charter High School for the
Performing Arts in Bethlehem before graduating with bachelor’s degrees in dance
and psychology from Allentown’s Cedar Crest College in 2011.
While in college,
Marino was president of the Nu Delta Alpha dance honor society, had one of her
choreographed pieces adjudicated at the American College Dance Festival and were
in five dance companies, which performed two concerts a year. She also
choreographed pieces for the Student Choreographers concert.
In recent years,
she has been dancing with Monarch, a professional dance company that performs
in the Lehigh Valley, New York, and Philadelphia areas.
Cartesian,
offering classes for all ages and skill levels focus on “developing a solid
technical foundation” in order for students to be “well-rounded, proficient
dancers,” according to a mission statement.
“We are sure to
encourage individuality, creativity, freedom, confidence and a love of dance in
all of our classes,” the statement continues.
Marino and a handful of other professionally trained instructors teach a wide array of
classes, including “Fun”damentals, Tots in Tutus and Jumps, Leaps and Turns.
“We offer
everything — ballet, tap, jazz, contemporary, modern, hip-hop, musical theater,
pointe and more,” Marino said.
Cartesian's grand the opening celebration, 1-5 p.m. Sunday, will feature a ribbon-cutting ceremony (1
p.m.), photo booth, face painting, cake and snacks, facility tours, children’s
games and activities, door prizes and a character meet-and-greet with Anna and
Elsa from “Frozen.”
To register for
classes or for more information, contact the studio at 610-849-2184 or visit
cartesiondance.com.
———
©2019 The Morning
Call (Allentown, Pa.)
Visit The Morning
Call (Allentown, Pa.) at www.mcall.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
03
How Quitting Dance Turned Margaret Qualley Into a Tarantino Muse and Emmy Nominee
Margaret Qualley
has always been self-conscious about her feet. In ballet classes from age 2,
she spent most of her life stuffing them into pointe shoes that left her with
what she considers mangled toes. "I hate my feet more than anything on the
fucking planet," she says, tucked into a back table at the Chateau Marmont
on a warm October afternoon.
Yet all 10 of
those mangled toes were prominently on display this summer, perched on Brad
Pitt's dashboard in a much-discussed barefooted scene in Quentin Tarantino's
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a film that turned out to be just one highlight
in a breakthrough year for the 25-year-old actress. After a half-decade of
solid, steady work in film and television — not to mention one viral perfume
commercial — the daughter of actress Andie MacDowell and former Gap model Paul
Qualley has notched "It" girl status, even earning her first Emmy
nomination this fall for her portrayal of Broadway legend Ann Reinking in the
FX limited series Fosse/Verdon.
Qualley plans to
keep that momentum going with a flurry of high-profile films, including
political drama Seberg with Kristen Stewart (opening Dec. 13), thriller The
Chain opposite Jamie Bell and Sebastian Stan and My Salinger Year in a starring
role as the assistant to J.D. Salinger's literary agent (portrayed by Sigourney
Weaver). She's playing in plenty of other sandboxes, too, appearing as a
character in Hideo Kojima's video game Death Stranding and becoming the new the face of a fashion campaign from French luxury brand Celine. And then there's
the top-secret short film directed by Booksmart's Olivia Wilde that she was
spotted shooting in Times Square in early October. As a sign of Qualley's
rising profile, Wilde reached out to her directly for the part.
With Qualley more
in demand than ever, it's no surprise when, after scouring the menu and
settling on an iced tea, she cops to being exhausted — though she doesn't look
it. "I've been to Europe five times in the past two months, most of which
were 24-hour in-and-outs," she explains. "I'm a walking zombie at the
moment." In fact, she just arrived in town late the night before following
a whirlwind one-day trip to Paris for a fashion collaboration she's forbidden
to talk about. "I've got to be so mysterious now," she says, rolling her
eyes.
Of course, she got
a master class in secrecy on Once Upon a Time, unable to tell a soul she was in
the Sony movie until the news came out. She cringes when she thinks about the
time on set when she whipped out her "embarrassing" feet in front of Tarantino
and Pitt, desperately pleading with them to keep them out of the film. "I
was like, 'Guys, look, these are awful,' " she recalls telling the pair
ahead of the scene. " 'Get me a foot double, please.' "
Despite growing up
with a famous mom, Qualley says she doesn't talk shop with MacDowell very often
and only recently watched Four Weddings and a Funeral. ("Who wants to
watch their mom kissing other dudes? It's weird.") Born in Montana and
raised in Asheville, North Carolina, there wasn't anything particularly
"Hollywood" about her upbringing, except for when she tried to get
her mom and dad to watch The Parent Trap after their divorce in hopes of a
reunion — only to instead come home to mom's new boyfriend, Dennis Quaid, the
movie star.
Qualley was
initially reluctant to have a career in Hollywood. "I didn't want to act
because my mom does that and …" she trails off, searching for the right
words to articulate what's often a sensitive subject for actors with famous
parents. "I think people often don't want to do what their parents
did." Instead, Qualley spent her childhood in ballet classes. At 14, she
left for boarding school at the North Carolina School of the Arts, and by 16,
she'd landed a coveted spot in the American Ballet Theatre's summer program in
New York. But just when she was offered a prestigious apprenticeship, she
decided to quit dance altogether.
For Qualley,
ballet had become about being perfect. "I was the first one there and the
last one to leave, but I don't think it was because I really loved it at that
point," she says. There were also the practically inescapable body-image
pressures of the strict ballet world. "You'd go to these check-ins and
they'd measure your fat and would send you a letter if you were too big or too
small. But, like," she pauses, "no one is too small."
Jobless but
hellbent on staying in New York, Qualley wrote her mom a carefully crafted
email laying out her master plan: She'd signed with modeling agency IMG to earn
enough money to stay in the city by herself and planned to enroll in
Professional Children's School, a go-to for kid performers. The good news was
that MacDowell bought in. The bad was that Qualley very quickly came up against
the same weight-related pressures in modeling that she'd encountered in dance.
"I struggled [the most] in the brief interim when I was modeling because , with ballet, there was at least so much work. With modeling, it was like, 'OK,
how do I work hard? I guess I get really fucking skinny?' " she says.
"So I did that and then I was like, 'Well, I'm miserable and not thinking
very clearly, so let's not keep this up.' "
She lasted four
months. At that point, her then-boyfriend, actor Nat Wolff, encouraged her to
go to an improv class with him. Any hesitations she'd had about following in
her mom's footsteps dissipated during that first class. "I was like, 'Oh,
my God, I have so many feelings, and this is all I want to do.' What have I
been thinking?" she recalls. Qualley swiftly enrolled in the Royal Academy
of Dramatic Art, London's premiere drama school, for a summer to study
Shakespeare and soon after scored her first onscreen role when she was visiting
Wolff on the set of Palo Alto and director Gia Coppola asked if she wanted to
be in the movie. "I was just hanging out and she was like, 'Let's just
make use of you,' " says Qualley, who cried in a scene with James Franco.
The next year, she
dropped out of NYU after a semester when she was cast as Justin Theroux's
onscreen daughter in HBO's critically beloved drama series The Leftovers.
Looking back, she credits the show with giving her "a crash course in
acting" that helped her land her first movie, Shane Black's The Nice Guys.
She still can't shake the audition for the latter. "I was super terrified
for that one because, like, Ryan Gosling," she says, breaking into nervous
laughter. "My heart was racing and I was just like, 'I can't handle this.
I've watched Blue Valentine too many times.' "
Her heart rate
also spiked when she auditioned for a Spike Jonze-directed Kenzo commercial — though
for a different reason. She recalls leaving Jonze's apartment drenched in sweat
despite it being the dead of winter in New York after dancing like a wild woman
for an hour straight. "It reminded me of all the things that I loved about
dance," says Qualley, her voice filled with a tinge of nostalgia. The
spot, which parodies glossy fragrance ads by following Qualley as she busts out
of a stuffy ballroom and dances manically around a foyer, went viral. She had
no idea the video, now at the north of 25 million views, would take off the way it
did. If she had, she quips, "I probably would've worked harder, to be
honest."
Qualley got to put
her dance skills to use again when she played Reinking, famed choreographer Bob
Fosse's lover and muse. Having spent countless hours in the back of a minivan
watching All That Jazz on the way to dance competitions as a kid, she's always
considered the Broadway star something of an idol. So Qualley was
understandably crestfallen when she found out she didn't get the role off her
initial tape. "Story of my life," she says. "I don't get the
part and they think about it for a couple of months and then I guess they're
like, 'Fuck it, we'll give it to that girl.' " She claims a version of
that happened not only with Fosse/Verdon but on The Leftovers and Once Upon a
Time, too. "I'm like the food you have in your refrigerator when you're
going to order delivery and then never get around to it and you're like, 'I
guess I'll eat that.' "
As if on cue,
creator Thomas Kail called her in to audition again, this time in person, and
Qualley immediately sold them in the room. "She walked in and she was just
like Ann. She had this incredible contradictory feel — poised and full of craft
and discipline but also spontaneous and goofy and self-effacing," says
Kail. "There's such an essence of unpredictability with Margaret."
She'd already filmed her first episode of the series when she reached Reinking
by phone, only to be struck by her distinctive voice. Intent on perfecting it
in the show, Qualley begged Kail to let her go back and ADR her lines in that
episode. Says Kail of the request, "That was very Margaret."
Glance at
Qualley's résumé and a pattern start to emerge. "It's always me with a
cool, famous dude to make me really nervous," she confesses, acknowledging
that Pitt, Theroux, Rockwell, and Gosling all fit the bill. Even though she now
calls Pitt a "friend," texts Reinking from time to time and has
become a new fixture for the paparazzi (her recent high-profile fling with
Saturday Night Live's Pete Davidson only added to the fervor), Qualley contends
her world hasn't been flipped upside down. "I'm not cool and I don't
party," she says, maintaining that she prefers to hang out with family and
friends and do "boring things" like read books, go to movies and take
dance classes. On this, she's emphatic: "My life has not changed."
Keeping Qualley
grounded is her close-knit relationship with her family. She's roommates with
her older sister, Rainey, an actress and singer-songwriter who performs under
the name Rainsford. Together they alternate between coasts, living in her
sister's Echo Park home when they're in Los Angeles and in Qualley's New York
apartment when they're on the East Coast, often quibbling about which city to
be in at any given moment. Qualley has even hatched a plan to lure her sister
away from California that involves setting her up with a New York man.
"I've really been pushing Trevor Noah on her, and she likes that idea a lot," she says.
She's just as
tight with her older brother, Justin, who lives on the family ranch in Montana,
even bringing him as her date to the Emmys. And she occasionally hops down to
Panama to visit her dad, a contractor who builds houses and lives out of them
as he does. "It's camping, essentially," she explains. "Growing
up, I would go to my dad's with a sleeping bag and a space heater and would
sneak into the YMCA to shower." When she went to stay with him a couple of
years ago, she found herself sleeping outside on a mattress, cooking dinner over
a fire, showering with a hose and peeing off the side of a railing. "Now
he's like, 'OK, Margaret, we have showers. Do you want to come?' " says
Qualley, who, despite her success, insists she's still fine with the hose.
She also maintains
she's still the kind of actress who's sure she's going to get fired from every
job she lands, only getting comfortable a few weeks in when she's certain the
production no longer has the budget to replace her. "Except for on the
Tarantino movie, I never got to be comfortable because they always had the
budget to replace me," she says with a laugh. Though according to
Tarantino, Qualley probably could've gotten away with relaxing a bit. "I
had to lose a lot of wonderful scenes," he said recently, "but I
never cut or trimmed any of Margaret's. She was the only person that I didn't
edit down."
Shrugging off the
praise in her typical self-deprecating fashion, Qualley at least acknowledges
she's still pinching herself about the opportunities coming her way. "It's
been a weird, circuitous route to be able to accomplish these things that I
don't think I would have been able to have I strictly stuck with ballet,"
she says. "All of these opportunities that I've had, my childhood self
would fucking die."
This story first appeared in a November stand-alone
issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here
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