This article appeared in the July 11, 2003 Jewish Advocate.

Summer dance program features Erika Wolf

By Susie Davidson

Advocate Correspondent

Here’s a great idea for those active kids: the Boston Dance Company’s Summer Dance Program. From July 7 to Aug. 14 at the Dance Complex, 550 Massachusetts Ave. in Central Square, Cambridge, workshops will be offered in all levels in ballet by the company’s artistic staff, James Reardon, Clyde Nantais, and Erika Wolf.

Participants can register for one to all six weeks. Dancers 13 years and up with two years of on pointe experience can attend the Monday-Thursday intensive from 10 a.m.-1:15 p.m. A Children’s Workshop for dancers aged 11-13 is held Monday-Thursday from 1:30-3:30 p.m., another for students with two years of ballet experience aged 9-11 meets Mondays and Wednesdays at the same time, and Advanced Adult Summer Ballet classes are held Monday-Thursday from 6-7:30 p.m.

“We have been doing this for about 10 years,” said Nantais, who, along with Artistic Director Reardon, is a former Boston Ballet dancer.

“We bring dance to communities that might not necessarily be exposed to it,” explained Reardon, noting that the company performs in Cambridge’s Fitzgerald Theater as well as at The Strand in Dorchester for $6 to $12 ticket prices, as opposed to the typical $45 to $75 for ballet.

“We involve students from local dancing schools with every community that we go to, in Salem, Norwell, or Worcester,” he added.

Wolf has danced for six years with the company and has taught for the last four. The Katonah, New York native spent all her free time dancing as a child. She trained at the Northern Westcheter Center for the Arts and the Joffrey Ballet School in NYC. I spent a lot of time doing homework on the train to ballet school! She spent summers at Burklyn Ballet Theatre in Vermont, Dance Aspen, and at the Joffrey Ballet, and her own choreography premiere in St. Petersburg, Russia. “As a good part of my heritage is Russian/Ukranian/Bellorussian, it was incredible,” she said.

Her great grandmother Jenny left Germany in 1941 on the second to last boat to leave. “Jenny was an amazing women; she was born in 1899 and witnessed an incredible amount of heartache in her life. Her sister and her sister's family were killed in Germany; her son, who was 13 when they got a sponsor to come to the US, died young, and she had three husbands, all of whom died.”

Wolf’s grandmother lived on her own in Queens until she died at 96. “She was crafty and funny and full of love,” said Wolf. “With a kitchen the size of a closet, she cooked elaborate dinners and then sent us home with frozen cookies, mundelbrot and meat. We didn't have the heart to tell her I am a vegetarian.” Wolf’s family still has her cookies frozen in their freezer.

Her father is a mathematician at the IBM Watson Research Center in New York, her mother a research psychologist at the same facility. The first year of Wolf’s life was spent at the Harvard Science Center where her father was a professor.

Her mother has battled ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) for six years and despite having a trach and very little muscle control, she still works each day. This past April, she received a Tufts Distinguished Alumni Award in Boston. Wolf is organizing a benefit folk concert for November in Arlington for the local ALS nonprofit ALS-Therapy Development Foundation. Her younger sister is beginning graduate school at Brown in elementary education.

Wolf spent her senior year of high school traveling the US, auditioning for professional ballet companies. She joined the Illinois Ballet Company and the Louisville Ballet, and on a whim, auditioned for the Boston Dance Company where she is now company dancer, ballet mistress (rehearsal director), and teacher. “My ballet technique has vastly improved here because Jimmy and Clyde are great teachers who never stop giving attention or challenging us. She received a Somerville Arts Council Fellowship award for her choreography. She graduated from Harvard with a bachelor’s in psychology in 2001 with the third highest GPA in her class. A research technician at the Boston VA Hospital, she was accepted into next fall’s clinical psychology doctoral program at Boston University. Just engaged, she is looking into chuppahs and other traditions.

She hopes to inspire the same love of dancing she experienced growing up. “It is incredibly rewarding to feel like I am passing down a lineage, a style of dancing and teaching that is exacting but supportive, the style that filled my soul as a young dancer. I see the same love in many of my students' eyes.” She teaches students from three years of age to advanced teens.”

“Critics have said that this is a company full of energy and passion and true love for dancing,” said Reardon. “And that comes across on the stage.”

“I feel I share Jenny’s fierce determination and optimism,” said Wolf. “I also learned, late in her life, that in Germany, she had been the lead dancer, ballroom dancer I believe, in some type of festival.”

All classes are taught by Boston Dance Company artistic staff (James Reardon, Clyde Nantais, Erika Wolf) and all classes take place at 550 Mass. Ave., Central Square. Call 617-491-8615 for more information.

More info (and pictures) about Wolf’s mother and ALS are on their family web site, www.alscommunity.org (select "WolfMom" from the drop down box).