My Journey - Part 5

A choreography by Saba I performed in in a showcase presented

by PMT House of Dance in Spring 2006 in New York City.

Before I stopped going to Saba's classes and hanging out with him, I had a great time rehearsing and performing his piece Rebound in a showcase presented by PMT House of Dance in the Spring of 2006. The title of the piece reflected the fact that almost the entire cast including myself and Saba were rebounding off failed relationships! But, the final result was one I was truly proud of. My wife who I began dating at the time came to all three performances, and I also went to her performances. She was studying jazz and lounge style singing at the Singer's Forum, so we already had much in common.

Shortly after this performance, I needed to look at my money situation seriously and not delve into fruitless pyramid schemes. I was seriously in need of work - a real job. Despite becoming far too busy too dance, my life improved a lot in other ways. I married my wonderful wife Mizue, and I got a New York City Teaching Fellowship through the City of New York which paid for a master's in teaching English while I worked full-time as a public school teacher. So, began my nearly 5 year foray into the art of teaching ESL to teens who were unable to read because of moderate to severe cognitive and emotional disabilities at Public School 721M in Manhattan. They were wonderful kids and the work was often fascinating, but it was incredibly challenging preparing lessons for students who could not read and write without the assistance of picture symbols and endlessly having to redirect students who were ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder). To complicate matters even more, I had to deal with very difficult bosses.

Around 2006-2009, I worked for 2 principals who were at war with the Teacher's Union at our school. The first principal, Sheryl Watkins, took a "my way or the highway" approach to leadership threatening teachers right, left, and center with insubordination or the non-existent category of "border-line" insubordination. The next principal, Carolle Brady, was clearly autistic and strongly believed that bulletin boards and the teachers' arrangement of desks in their classrooms were the only indicators of "good" teaching practices. She soon began to harass teachers without provocation, and threatened their jobs! Thanks to the Union and the support of the teachers, these two administrators were eventually removed permanently from our school.

My Journey - Part 4

For 10 years, I avoided dance - afraid I would get too passionate about it, afraid of not having enough money to pay my bills, or afraid of not being good enough. Between 2005 and 2006, I had a personal crisis and I was between jobs. I decided that I needed to do something good for myself - and that something good was - dance. I had moved down to New York City - the dance capital - in the fatal year of 2001, but four years later I had still not even tried a single dance class. So, I purchased a few class cards at different studios around town, and soon got into a routine of taking daily dance classes at various schools including Broadway Dance Center, Peridance Capezio Center, The Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance and PMT Dance Studio. I had seriously begun to train as a dancer again!

During this period, I discovered that beginner ballet classes as advertised at Broadway Dance Center were actually warm-up classes for professional dancers and dancers who were auditioning for professional roles. I had never danced with such an annoying bunch of pimadonas, and even had one classmate push me out of the way because I had difficulty mastering the steps of an accross the floor combination! Nevertheless, I enjoyed working most with Dariusz R. Hochman at Broadway Dance Center. Hochman was a task master who took all of his students seriously. He rewarded hard work with an old school tough love approach to ballet. He reminded me very much of my sarcastic, dry-humored but very dedicated ballet teacher at Simon Fraser University - Grant Strate. Hochman, in old school fashion, had separated the men and women into men's and women's groups when they performed ballet combinations. When the men performed, he slowed down the music so that we would have to jump higher. Mr. Hochman thought I was weak, and he used to yell at me to eat more vegetables. But with only three male students in the class, we got of lot of personal attention.

After trying a few more dance studios, I met a very interesting teacher who taught at Peridance Capezio Dance Center and PMT House of Dance. Sebastian Sabatier-Curiel, or Saba as he likes to be called, taught an enjoyable beginner Graham style modern dance class. He loved being the center of attention with constant joking, operatic singing in the middle of an exercise, or anecdotes about working with the late Martha Graham. After our classes, he often held small wine and cheese parties at his home, which oddly enough over time started turning into sales pitch meetings to recruit us into a pyramid scheme to sell health products for an Amway type of company called USANA. I eventually had to distance myself from Saba as a result.