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Learning to light up the stage: at the School of Oregon Ballet Theatre.

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Moving all the time, adjusting a leg here, a port de bras there, singing out the instructions in the rhythm she wants, Damara Bennett, director of the School of Oregon Ballet Theatre, puts the advanced level IIIB students through their paces. She gives fine-tuned, detailed corrections firmly, but with a smile in her striking green eyes. Occasionally she gives an anatomical explanation of how one position needs to flow from another. Several times, she admonishes her students not to be stingy with their dancing.

Whatever level Bennett teaches--and she teaches them all, from pre-ballet to pre-professional students and apprentices in Level IV, plus a weekly company class--the focus is the same: meticulous, individualized training in classical ballet geared towards creating well-educated professional dancers. The instruction not to be stingy is significant: Both Bennett and OBT artistic director Christopher Stowell like generous performers, who, he says, "use the brain as much as the body."

And performing is what this school is...

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