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Photograph by Skye Dunlap
Reflections of Beauty: Nicole Alexander (front) and her fellow students learn the art of graceful movement from Gloria Mohr at her ballet studio in Campbell.
A Graceful Body of Work
Ballerina Gloria Mohr teaches her students that anyone can learn how to be elegant
By Suzanne Barnecut
On a recent Saturday morning at Gloria Mohr's studio at the International Ballet School in Campbell, the professional ballerina and Willow Glen resident is advising her students to "jump and look like you're flying out over the ocean." The dancers leap and pirouette, heads cocked high, held with confidence even as feet may stumble. As groups of two and three move across the room, watching the mirrors as though they reflected bright spotlights and dark audiences, Mohr calls out "Strong! Determined!" then riffles through records of classical music.
As Mohr teaches the class step combinations, she also stresses body position and technique. If a pirouette is to be done, it will be done correctly. She uses her favorite perfume--Gucci's Envy--to describe the way the women, all a range of ages, should maintain their bodies: tall and upright, as though contained in a perfect cylinder.
Mohr, a private coach and director of her own school, has taught at a myriad of schools including the College of Theatre Arts in Pasadena, the Academy of Ballet in San Francisco, the Los Gatos Academy of Ballet and West Valley College in Saratoga. She's also seen glitz and glamour beyond San Jose--she spent 10 years with the New York City Ballet Company at the invitation of the great George Balanchine, whom she sometimes refers to as Mr. B.
Mohr first met Balanchine on the MGM Studios lot at the age of 13, when she was auditioning for the role of young Anna in The Anna Pavlova Story. Balanchine was going to choreograph the dancing in the film. Mohr got the part--although the movie was never made. It would be another five years before Mohr encountered Balanchine again.
When she was 18, Mohr left Hollywood, where she'd grown up, to return to her birthplace of New York, cherishing hopes of college and then study at the Sorbonne. In the meantime, she wanted to continue taking ballet classes. She auditioned at Balanchine's School of American Ballet--later to become a feeder school for the New York City Ballet--and was placed in the highest class. One day in class Mohr was aware that there was a visitor watching, but without her glasses on she couldn't distinguish the features of the visitor's face. When class ended, the visitor approached her and it was then Mohr recognized George Balanchine himself, who asked to see her in his office.
"I came face to face with the man I had seen on the cover of Time. I knew Balanchine," she says in astonished recollection. "I thought, 'Oh my God! That's who was there all that time!' " While her mother waited outside, Mohr stepped into Balanchine's office a young hopeful, and left the newest member of the New York City Ballet, shortly to begin the first of her many tours of Europe.
Photograph by Skye Dunlap
Learning Curve: Gloria Mohr believes the process of learning dance is as important as the end result.
Mohr's family's move to Hollywood was not in pursuit of stardom. Her father was a jeweler and her mother a ballroom dancer who danced on cruise ships and at elite clubs like the Rainbow Room. "My mother loved dancing," Mohr says, "and she was a beautiful ballroom dancer though she had no formal training."
Mohr attended the Mar-Ken private school, which offered a concentrated set of courses between 7:30 a.m. and noon, allowing students pursuing arts careers to take lessons and attend rehearsals. One of Mohr's most notable classmates was John Barrymore Jr. She later worked with him on Romeo and Juliet at the Pasadena Playhouse while attending Pasadena College during breaks from the NYC Ballet.
"There was no question I would be given dancing," Mohr says, remembering her mother's influence, "but it was also just so that I would be graceful. I was nearsighted and tripped a lot. My mother probably wanted me to go on with dancing, but there was no guarantee." Mohr received lessons of all kinds; tennis, golf, and horseback riding--activities that aspiring dancers would normally not think of doing for fear of injury. Additionally, in all the years that Mohr danced, she never performed in recitals, except once in Aida at the Philharmonic Auditorium in Los Angeles when she was 11 years old. Her concentration then, and now in her own school, is always on the dance, not the performance. And with dance comes music. Mohr was also schooled in violin and piano, and would have liked to become a professional violinist, were it not for her desire to be on stage rather than in the orchestra pit.
"For Balanchine, myself and most dancers," she explains, "music comes first and dance second. If you can hear the accents and grades of the music you can move faster. [The dance] is in between the music. We don't want people to be on the number when we say, 'And one, and two. ...' The finer dancer should already be there."
While Mohr is a purist when it comes to the form and spirit of dancing, she is also a realist. She tells about a student who had a contract for the San Francisco Ballet in one hand, and an interest in medicine in the other. Mohr advised the student to choose medicine; it would be lasting.
"You are dependent on your body," says Mohr of dancing, "which changes by the time you become forty-five. It's not that you can't dance, but you can't keep up with the young ones."
Photograph by Skye Dunlap
Grace Under Pressure: Gloria Mohr stresses the importance of strength and determination to student Cris Gianetto.
Perhaps Mohr can't keep up with young ones, but she can teach them. Her résumé is long, listing television productions, special invitations to dance with Greek Theatre Productions, the Pacific Ballet Company and the San Jose Dance Theatre. She has trained under greats such as Bronislava Nijinska, Theodore Kosloff, Carmelita Maracci, Serge Oukrainsky, Vera Volkova and others. To non-dancers, these are just names, but in the dancing profession, they are legends.
At her modest but highly functional ballet school, Mohr simply teaches what she has learned, offers no recitals, and is extremely flexible. Her classes run in sessions of four to eight weeks so that no class seems too overwhelming a commitment for students. She also coaches privately in the mornings. Much in line with her philosophy on dancing--that one works through the process of improvement rather than focus on the final end result--Mohr stresses her support of education.
"If my students are not doing well in [academic] classes, I don't want to see them," she says staunchly. "They can miss a [dance] class. I won't say, 'You'll never make it because you're never here.' They will get good technique and become a better dancer, but you have to allow for a life, even if you do become a dancer."
During her years with the New York City Ballet, she learned 36 ballets in four weeks and danced in every opera house in Europe. Mohr revisited those memories two years ago in November 1998 for the 50th Anniversary Opening Night Benefit dinner for the NYC Ballet. The event, something like Cinderella's ball with tables designed by fashion designer Vera Wang and ticket prices as high as $1,000 per seat, was "fun for us [the dancers] because it will never happen again," Mohr says. "It was an honor."
Having given her years to dancing, what Mohr stresses as most important now is family. It was her then-husband who brought Mohr to San Jose nearly 25 years ago. Today she enjoys the company of her "special gentleman," Richard Myers. She is expecting to become a grandmother for the first time this May.
"When you raise children," she says thoughtfully, "raise them to be good people first and then let them choose their careers for themselves." Her son, Michael, is an electrical engineer, and her daughter, Brigitte, is an attorney. Mohr is also a "surrogate mother and psychologist," as she puts it, for all her students. "I have wonderful friends. I have more people that become like sons and daughters," she says.
What Mohr has learned through her years of teaching is that "You can create anything out of anything if the person wants it. I never say no to anyone who says, 'I'm clumsy or overweight.' I have people of many shapes and sizes, but they always learn to dance."
The International Ballet School is at 236 W. Campbell Ave., Campbell. For information call the studio at 408.269.3079.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
