They really are different.
They’d be the first ones to admit it, those high school kids who get up each weekday morning and climb not onto a school bus but onto a commuter train to follow their dreams to an old brick two-story building on the Near North Side of Chicago.
If you ask any of the 143 students from throughout the Chicago area who gather each day at the Chicago Academy for the Performing Arts why they make the trek and then spend up to 10 hours a day toiling here, they’ll talk about dedication. They’ll mention a driving passion. They’ll say they feel they really belong there.
“Everyone is here for a purpose,” said Bianca Cabrera, 17, a senior dance major from Naperville. “When I came here my freshman year and saw this place, I knew I was going to work hard. I’ve always loved dancing, but I never had a chance to take it seriously until now.”
Joseph Binder, 15, a sophomore theater major from Lisle, said he had a lot of friends at Kennedy Junior High School before he enrolled at the academy. He wasn’t the cliche of artistic misfit. But none of those friends was interested in theater.
“It was totally foreign to them,” Binder said. “All they talked about was football, wrestling. There was no one of similar interests to talk to. If I had gone on to high school in Naperville, I would have been relegated to talking about the NBA. But at the academy, there’s something in common, a love of the arts, among everyone.”
Ted Schneider, 17, a senior musical theater major from Hinsdale, said that he believes the environment at Hinsdale Central High School would not have encouraged him to be unique.
“I feel a need to rebel against the standard. The academy is ambiguous enough so that I could make myself any kind of person I wanted to be.”
The parents of these students pay a high price for nurturing their children’s uniqueness. The academy’s tuition is $8,815 a year, but the headmaster, Frank Mustari, said that at least 50 per cent of the students get some kind of financial assistance.
Just having the money to meet the tuition, however, doesn’t guarantee entry to Illinois’ only secondary school dedicated to the performing arts. Would-be students must take an entrance exam and audition or show a portfolio to a panel of academy faculty members of the department they wish to enter.
“It was so scary because I had never done anything like that before,” Cabrera said of her audition. “There were a lot of guys and girls there who had more experience than I did. I was really nervous. It was kind of intimidating.”
But perfection isn’t necessarily what the panel is looking for, Mustari said. “We look for students who are highly creative, highly individualistic and very dedicated to their art,” he said.
The academy is the brainchild of a group of Chicago-area people, including TV producer Essie Kupcinet and Second City producer Joyce Sloan, who in 1980 agreed to form a committee to research for the public school system the possibility of opening a magnet school for the arts.
The magnet school proved too expensive for the public school system to finance, but the committee, too excited to give up the dream, went ahead with the concept, transforming it into a privately funded institution, which opened in 1981. Since then, it has been the academy’s goal to turn out well-rounded individuals, not just artists, Mustari said.
“There is no such thing as a dumb artist,” Mustari contended. “It has been our philosophy that you can’t succeed unless you are fully educated.”
In keeping with this philosophy, academy students spend their mornings taking the same college preparatory classes that they would have faced at a high school in the suburbs. But at the academy, the teachers keep their students’ artistic bent in mind.
“There are fewer kids in each class, and I like the teachers better here,” Cabrera said. “Even the math teachers put artistic things in their teaching so it’s not so dry. Since it’s an art school, they know what everybody is here for.”
After 1:30 p.m., academy students put their math and science books away and turn their attention to their raison d’etre, their art. The academy allows students to specialize in any of five areas: dance, music, theater, visual arts, or writing and communications. Now they can practice their pirouettes, ink their linoleum etchings, improve their stage techniques or rewrite their poetry. Cabrera spends an hour and a half each day in ballet class and another hour and a half in either jazz or modern dance classes and stretching classes. Although the school day officially ends at 4:30 p.m., most students, like Cabrera, end up staying until 6 p.m. to practice what they’ve learned.
“We pick Bianca up at the train station at 7:30 p.m.,” said her mother, Valerie Gleeson. “It’s a long day. But she’s happy. She’s excelling in her program. She’s encouraged to do better in all aspects of school. It has been a positive move for her as far as I’m concerned.”
The mother of four other children, Gleeson said she has found the Naperville schools to be outstanding if a child is headed toward a more traditional occupation.
“But there’s not a lot here for you if you are artistic,” Gleeson said. “Bianca’s not an academic person. She’s a right-brain person. I wanted to send her somewhere that would prepare her for what she wanted to do.”
Gleeson admits that the kids at the academy are obsessed with their art. “It’s what they live and breathe,” she said. “They really drive themselves, but they also understand each other. They are a peer group that supports each other.”
Binder’s dad, also named Joseph, admitted that he and his wife, Susan, had not been in favor of sending their son to the academy. “There was the transportation and cost factor,” he said. “But we also were concerned about him getting in an isolated group, all artistic. We were worried he wouldn’t get a diversity of social interaction.”
But after young Binder spent a summer attending a workshop at the academy, his father said they saw things a little differently: “He met kids from different neighborhoods, different economic backgrounds. I definitely think there are so many paths to take, and the suburban path is very narrow. Now I think if he had gone to Naperville North High School, he would have been in a more isolated group.”
Like the Binders, Nancy Schneider confesses she had misgivings when Ted first suggested he could attend the academy.
“I thought, no way is my child going to that school,” she said. “I thought, `What is this place? It’s in such bad disrepair.’ But Ted had a passion to give it a try, and after meeting that incredible staff, I thought, `There’s no way he isn’t going there.’ “
Nancy Schneider said it was hard to give up the academics that Ted would have been exposed to at Hinsdale High School, but she believes her son made the right decision.
“Ted’s there till 6 every day, learning staging, stage combat, taking voice lessons,” she said. “It’s all there. Directors call over there and ask people to come in and audition. He makes contacts. The school allows him to leave for auditions and come back in a cab. They make arrangements around shows. And they have people come in. People like (actress) Julie Harris come in and talk.
“This is the program he wanted. He’s a lucky kid.”
Nancy Schneider believes that, because of the academy’s training, her son is two years ahead of drama students in the local high schools. Ted, who before attending the academy had participated in Western Springs Theater productions, also credits the academy with opening doors for him.
In his freshman year, he said, he was given the opportunity to audition for Sandra Grand at the Chicago Dramatist Workshop for a role in Chicago playwright David Rush’s “Ellen Universe Joins the Band.” He got the role. The next summer, Grand recommended him for a part in another production, “Hitting for the Cycles — Nine Original One-Act Plays,” at the Famous Door Theater.
“I’ve been working with seasoned professional actors, studying what they’re doing, being able to be on stage with them and react to what they’re doing,” Schneider said.
He said he has taken what he is learning as an actor and applied it to his life as he would apply personality layers to the bare-bones skeleton of a stage character.
“Being at the academy has made me not just an artist but a fuller, more mature person,” Schneider said. “I can’t think of a more valuable thing I have access to as a person for structuring a well-rounded, creative, artistic and good-natured person.”
Strong praise for the academy’s program, and Richard Schultz, artistic director of Naperville’s Theatre Eclectic, where Binder is an understudy in the production of “Patsy’s Bridal Shower,” said the academy has definitely given Binder an advantage over other high school students.
“We have another high school student in the production,” Schultz said. “She’s a senior at Benet Academy. We’ve discussed how Joe is so much farther along in his knowledge of the theater. She’s very talented, but in terms of her own training, Joe has that leg up.”
Schultz calls the academy a wonderful addition to education in Chicago. “Of course, we wish it were in the suburbs so we could take more advantage of it,” he said. “I wish it had been around when I was in high school. It would have made my path, finding my niche as a director, easier.”
Harriet Ross, artistic administrator and outreach coordinator for the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, said her company is using two academy dancers among the 14 seasonal dancers who have been added to their Christmas production of “The Nutcracker.” Gerald Arpino, founder and artistic director of the Joffrey, is even considering instituting an apprentice program with the academy, Ross said.
“We’re very supportive of what the academy is doing,” she said. “It offers excellent training by very fine teachers in an atmosphere where artists can work and be serious and not laughed at, at an age when a lot of people aren’t serious.”
A graduate of the New York High School for the Performing Arts, Ross said she knows the impact such an education can have on a young person’s life.
“Young artists, instead of being respected, often get just the opposite,” she explained. “Such a school validates the young artist. The arts need support and validation. We need to help one another.”
That support from his fellow students, that camaraderie, is one of the things Craig Hall, a Maywood resident who graduated from the academy in June and is now a student at the School of the American Ballet Theater in New York City, said he finds himself missing in his new life.
“I miss my friends. I miss everyone,” he said. “The whole experience. How they nurtured me. They saw I was a talented dancer, and they pushed me. If I hadn’t gone there, I probably would be at some college not knowing what I want to do, not thinking about dancing. I loved going there every single day. I knew everyone. That school was like a family.”
