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From bullets to ballet: at THEARC, Washington ballet reaches out to the community.

Article Excerpt
The yellow school bus passes beat-up apartment complexes and newly minted townhouses. Pulling into the parking lot, a gaggle of 6- and 7-year-olds crane their necks to see their destination. Before them stands a new 110,000-square-foot complex housing a state-of-the-art theater, dance and music studios, a girls' middle school, a recreation center, and a medical clinic. With its brick and glass edifice aglow in the fading afternoon, THEARC (officially Town Hall Education Arts & Recreation Campus), situated east of the Anacostia River, serves the most disadvantaged population in Washington, D.C. It's a neighborhood more familiar with bullets than ballet.

Yet THEARC is home to a variety of arts outreach programs, among them The Washington Ballet@THEARC. The ballet already had an outreach effort, DanceDC, in public elementary schools. A 12-week classical ballet curriculum that rotates to first and second graders in more than seven schools, DanceDC began in 1999. It's now part of...

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