Return to Pointer View home page June 18, 2004

The lady of the dance

By Spc. Benjamin Gruver
Staff Writer

If you were surprised recently when you tuned to the post command channel and saw young dancers prancing and twirling onstage, listen up. That was just a taste of what West Point’s Youth Services instructional dance classes brings to the community. 

 Dance instructor Marisa Paull, who spent most of her childhood training for a professional ballet career, is the driving force behind the 142 young dancers.

“The rewarding part for me is when I see them so proud of themselves for having achieved something over time,” said Paull. “It took time and they had to keep coming back to it. They didn’t get it at first or on the second and third try, but four months later you do see a difference in them.”

Paull, 24, began a career in ballet at age eight when, just for the heck of it, one of her instructors took her to New York City for an audition at the School of American Ballet. She ended up getting accepted.

“One of my teachers asked, ‘are you serious about this?’” explained Paull. “I thought about it for a minute and said, ‘yes, I am a 100 percent serious.’ From then on ballet training was what I did and you fit school in to the cracks in your schedule.”

Her dance career led her to study at the Kirov Academy in Washington, D.C. Then the years of ballet and dance training just became too much.  

“It was my entire life and I burned-out,” Paull explained. “I just craved a normal life and I was unhappy.”

One of my teachers told me if I was not going to do ballet, I was going to college, she explained. Within a matter of months they helped her get into Smith College in North Hampton, Mass.

“That was a life changing event because I thought that dance was all I had,” she said.

College took her completely away from dance and gave her the time to do other things -- like photography and sports -- for the first time in her life.

“I had a sort of infusion of normal life,” she explained.

She graduated in 2002 with the highest honors in her major. But like many graduates, she had a hard time deciding what to do next.

Amid her transition from college life, she moved to Cornwall, got a job as a waitress and signed up for dance classes at a local ballet studio. It was there she met Marybeth Ritkouski, the YS dance instructor at the time.

Ritkouski befriended Paull, and it wasn’t long before Paull was helping her with dance classes.

Ritkouski left in 2003 and Paull took over the program.

“It is the other side of my passion for dance that I never knew existed,” Paull said. “It is what got me into it first, but the training squeezed that out. It is so much fun to put on a show and to discipline yourself, it’s very rewarding.”

Paull inherited a program she considers “bursting at the seams.” She teaches 19 classes a week with student’s ranging from three to 15.

One of her goals, she said, is to add more classes to separate the older students from the younger ones.

“We would do two different versions of everything in class,” she explained. “It is a shame because they could learn so much more and be so much more involved if every five minutes they weren’t sitting down.”

According to Paull the program needs more time and space. The current room is also a recreational room at the YS, so she has to move the furniture around twice a day.   

“I want them to have it as good as possible and if that means that I move the furniture a gazillion times then I move it a gazillion times,” she said.

Summer sessions begin as early as July 12 and registration for fall classes begins July 26. For more information, contact Youth Services at 938-3727.

“My other goal is to teach them some of the majesty and the mystery of the dance,” Paull explained. “What ends up happening is they come in with some of that majesty and mystery and what I really give them is a little bit of a technique or a language with which to explore it.”