Stepping out

Duffle bags ruffle softly as the women kick off their tennis shoes and flats, digging for ballet slippers. On pair after pair, countless pirouettes have worn down the satin’s once-lustrous sheen to a homely patina. Fitting them on, these women—college students, homemakers, a speech pathologist, a retired librarian—are, in an instant, newborn ballerinas. They curl their toes and fingers, stretching every sinewy muscle in between as their bodies bend lyrically in the early light of the studio.

It’s five past nine, and instructor Michele Ball is ready to begin her class. “You just never know with Geoffrey,” Ball says, smiling as she waits for the only male student she expects this morning—or any morning, typically. The comment is not dismissive of Geoffrey Hyams’ attitude or personality, just realistic based on his schedule. The 21-year-old ricochets among a full-time business curriculum at Baton Rouge Community College, hip-hop classes and long hours cooking brisket and pulled pork at a local barbecue joint. He has no cell phone and rarely checks e-mail. He doesn’t have the time.

“Sorry I’m late,” Hyams says softly as he enters the studio and lowers an earbud from under his dark dreads and backwards black baseball cap. In a black sleeveless shirt, long dress socks and sleek black rubbery sneakers, he looks like a high-flying swingman for a run-and-gun basketball squad.

While the rest of the dancers lift their legs to the bar that hugs the wall around the room, Hyams takes his place among them. Thin-framed, with hardly a scrap of body fat, Hyams leans forward, his leg thrust backward in the air, his strong torso counterbalancing his body and his toes stretched high to the ceiling.

The petite dancer leaning into the bar next to him gazes up at this display of long-limbed dexterity. “Wow,” she mouths to herself.

Five months ago Hyams could not have done even that. He might have fallen right to the floor. He began practicing ballet last fall with ulterior motives, to improve the hip-hop dancing he grew up on in New Orleans before Katrina relocated his large family to Baton Rouge.

Trading the free-flowing and wide-ranging moves of hip-hop for the intricately structured and traditional skills of ballet proved incredibly difficult, even for a former high-school swimmer, football player and track runner.

“I couldn’t do anything at first,” Hyams says. “And with the French vocabulary, I was lost. I thought, ‘This is not going to work.’ At first, I ain’t going to lie, I just wanted to do hip-hop.”

Even worse, he caught flak from his skateboarding friends, and even his sister, for taking up the female-dominated artform.

“Curtsies are for girls, for us,” Ball says, correcting Hyams at the end of one routine. “You don’t have to curtsey—ever.”

But it is not the gender of his company that is most challenging. It is the experience. “He’s had to internalize a lot of things quickly because he hasn’t been doing this since he was 7 years old like some,” says Christine Perkins, the instructor who first encouraged Hyams to try out for last year’s The Nutcracker, a performance that completely changed his view of himself as a successful ballerino. “The good thing is he takes all corrections like they are golden.”

To many, Hyams is like the company’s all-smiling, eager-to-learn little brother.

Yao Wei stands positioned next to him at the bar, and the two share more than a few laughs throughout class. He asks twice as many questions as anyone else does all morning.

“It’s intimidating, because most of them started when they were much younger, and they know a lot of this stuff already,” Hyams says. “At the same time, it’s cool, because I get to watch them and imitate them. I don’t want to be labeled as a hip-hop dancer. I want to be labeled as a dancer, period.”

Now, when Hyams is not in class or at work, he practices ballet. He even finds himself unconsciously turning household chores like laundry and sweeping into impromptu performances. “It’s really taken over my life right now,” he says. “But I like that. I really do.”

Hyams plans to perfect his technique here with the Baton Rouge Ballet Company while in school, then travel.

To be a professional probably means moving away from home to places he has experienced only through movies and magazines. “Most of the dance is in NYC or L.A., they say,” Hyams admits. “I’ve seen people come from Tokyo and perform, and their style is just amazing. I want that. I really do.”

After some prompting from Perkins, Hyams applied to and was accepted for a prestigious six-week ballet school in Nashville this summer. He could return a changed dancer. Whether performing back in Baton Rouge this fall or years from now with a touring troupe, Hyams will be chasing that first incredible rush he felt during his debut performance last year as a soldier in The Nutcracker.

Something about that performance has stayed with him—something that reminds him of the feeling he gets dancing through his chores, the excitement he felt when, as a child, he first began dancing to the tunes his pianist father would play at home.

There was something brilliant about the lights, too.

Maybe looking into them is like seeing his future.

“Other dancers say they are blinding, but I just love how they look,” he says. “I’m on stage, I know there are a thousand eyes on me, but its like nobody’s there at all, like I am dancing and nobody is watching. I’m in my own world and can express myself how I want to. In The Nutcracker I felt free. It was a simple paradise.”