You might expect local dance legend Stephanie Clemens to be winding down, especially during the summer months.
Anything but.
“We felt we needed to rebrand the Academy and be more contemporary,” she said at George’s Restaurant recently, one of her favorite haunts. “I’ve been resting on our laurels for entirely too long, depending on word of mouth.”
Last summer, things were a little too quiet around the Academy of Movement and Music, the converted former military academy that has been home to Clemens’ dance school, tucked away south and west of the southwest corner of East Avenue and Lake Street for the past four decades, a long and successful run by anyone’s standards — except maybe Clemens’.
The competition is intense for one thing.
“BRAVO and CAST have upped the ante around here tremendously,” she said. “Tina Reynolds [head of BRAVO and the recently opened Ovation Academy] is a real house of fire. So I’ve had to adapt, and that’s not easy at 73 after 44 years of teaching.”
In the past, she encouraged her students to take summer intensive classes in the city and beyond. Summer intensives have been in vogue for aspiring dancers for the past 30 years. And Clemens was happy to promote them because it kept her dancers sharp in the “off season.”
But last year she realized, “I was promoting other people’s businesses at the expense of my own.”
So this summer for the first time, the Academy is offering eight summer “mini-intensives,” one per week from June 8 through the end of July. And she’s bringing back her alums to teach them.
Her son, professional dancer J.P. Tenuta (who recently performed in Lyric Opera’s production of Carousel), came up with the idea.
“He said, ‘You need to have intensives here. You’ve got one of the most beautiful facilities in the city, and we can bring in people who have known you for years to teach.”
Including, of course, J.P. Tenuta.
“I called in my chits,” Clemens said, smiling.
J.P. wasn’t the only one who grew up with her. Professional dancers Sarah Fuller, Natalie Williams, and Ariane Dolan, all started at the Academy as young children, age 3 or 4. Dolan has made a living performing in dinner theater productions all over the Chicago area. She also danced in Oklahoma at Lyric. Williams just finished a two-year world tour of West Side Story. Fuller danced with Hubbard Street Theater.
“I gave Sandra Kaufmann her first ballet lesson,” Clemens recalled. “She heads Loyola University’s dance department now.”
Randy Duncan, who did his first teaching for Clemens, is now teaching at Yale and has choreographed such films as Save the Last Dance. Clemens gave him his first choreography commission.
Ron De Jesus, whom Clemens once hired as a custodian at the Academy, started dancing on a dare. A club dancer, he auditioned for Ensemble Espanol and got in without ever taking a dance lesson. Then he joined the Joseph Holmes Dance Theater and Clemens let them use her space for rehearsals, free of charge. From there he moved to Hubbard Street Theater and then to Broadway, where he starred in Twyla Tharp’s musical Movin’ Out.
Now he teaches at the University of Michigan as a professor of musical theater, all without a college degree.
“He’s bringing a vocal coach and an acting coach from Michigan,” Clemens noted. “He’s a teaching triple threat.”
Clearly, Clemens inspires loyalty.
“One of our mottos when we started,” she said, “was ‘There’s no place like home,’ and these people who have made good have come home to show the kids who are currently here what’s out there, what they can do.”
As if to underscore the loyalty she inspires, two separate fathers of former dance alums and one of J.P.’s former Montessori teachers came to our booth at George’s during lunch to say hello and give (or get) updates on her former charges.
The intensives cover a wide range. Sarah Fuller (June 8-11) leads off with contemporary 21st century ballet and improvisation. Sandra Kaufmann (June 15-18) will focus on the technique and repertory of modern dance pioneer Martha Graham. Gail Corbin (June 22-25) specializes in Doris Humphrey-Charles Weidman technique. J.P. and his former teacher at Northern Illinois University, Randy Newsom (June 29-July 2), will offer instruction in Bournonville style 19th century Romantic ballet. Natalie Williams (July 6-9) will focus on West Side Story and musical theater touring (audition skills and tour etiquette).Randy Duncan, Ariane Dolan and Autumn Eckman (July 13-16) teach the Jazz Masters. Veronica Guadalupe (July 20 and 22), a friend of J.P., will do Titoyaya contemporary style. And Ron De Jesus (July 27-30) ends the series with his triple threat (dance, voice and acting). The mini-intensives allow students taking classes elsewhere to fit some into their schedules.
“I’ve had several students sign up for all eight,” Clemens said. In the evenings, they attend regular Academy classes. And for the first time, they will offer Saturday classes as well (alum Sarita Smith Childs teaching jazz dance).
That’s a lot of dancing, but Clemens’ students tend to be high-achievers. Many go on to double major in college — interesting combinations like dance and engineering.
“The one thing my dancers don’t do well is sleep,” she said.
The barre is set high, so to speak, but Clemens is conscious of not driving them over some edge. How does she walk that tight wire?
“The real secret is to teach them to love it,” she said. “That’s what we start doing when they’re 3.”
And there are two other “secrets.”
“One of the best-kept secrets about children is that they love to work hard,” she said. “The other is that performing is an addiction. It makes endorphins. You get high when you perform. We have a building with our own theater and we perform a lot.”
Thus far, registrations for the summer intensives are going well — at least within the Academy, but she wants to draw from the larger dance community. To that end, she’s using social media to reach a 25-mile radius of Oak Park. She’s got two students coming from England and one from Canada.
But Oak Park will always be her base.
“Having a preschool based in the arts is unusual. People tend to stay and live here a long time. We have a generational phenomenon. This community has always been very supportive of family and kids, very supportive of strong educational values, and very supportive of the arts. I couldn’t have landed in a better community to have this school.”
