Liz Cantine, lifelong dancer and educator, takes pride in legacy at Palos Verdes Performing Art Center and beyond
Nearly 20 years ago, Liz Cantine stood in the gymnasium at San Pedro’s Dana Middle School. Scanning the group of girls who’d gathered to audition for the dance drill team, the petite advisor immediately noticed a thin African-American girl whose mere poise impressed her.
“She looked just like a dancer,” Cantine remembers. “She’d never danced before, but she could do just about anything I asked her to do.”
Misty Copeland was just 14 years old at the time, but she confided in Cantine and her husband Richard of her aspirations to become a classical ballet dancer in American Ballet Theater in New York. At the time, the young girl lived in a motel room with her mother and five siblings.
“We said, ‘Fine. We’ll do anything we can to get you there,’” Cantine recalls. “And bottom line, we did.”
At the recent Valentine Ball at the Palos Verdes Performing Arts Center, Copeland, now 32 and the first African-American female soloist in a classical ballet company, honored her godmother with a beautiful ballet routine on an expansive screen. Cantine, who was named the event’s in-house celebrity for her 33 years of dedication at the PVAC, was moved to tears.
In Cantine’s in-home dance studio in Rancho Palos Verdes, two adjacent walls bear some of her proudest accomplishments to date. An assemblage of thank-you notes and framed pictures shows her in the arms of her old and current students, from Copeland to special needs students to local seniors.
Cantine, who was born blind in one eye, said her passion for dance was ignited when she was 4 and her mother took her to see “Swan Lake” at the Shrine Theater. She begged her parents for dance lessons and in an effort to draw the young bookworm away from straining her vision, they acquiesced. She began receiving instruction under Burch Mann, the founder of the American Folk Ballet.
When she was 16, Cantine joined Mann’s professional American Folk Ballet company, with whom she performed regionally, including at the Hollywood Bowl, Ford Theater and the Wilshire Ebell Theater. Along with a spiritual African folk group, the dance company performed at the opening of Frontierland at Disneyland.
“That’ll date me!” Cantine said.
She was a sophomore at UCLA when the dance company made plans to embark on a national tour. She faced a difficult decision: should she stay in school or stay with the company? Her parents, second-generation Lebanese Americans, had instilled in her and her siblings the value of education and of a college degree.
“I don’t think I thought about it more than a few minutes,” Cantine remembers. “I just couldn’t do it. I knew everything they had worked for was for us to graduate from college.”
The dance company would continue on to perform on the Ed Sullivan Show, the Academy Awards and tour in Russia. Meanwhile Cantine continued dancing, both at UCLA and at the University of Beirut, where she spent her junior year. There, she joined a modern dance troupe with students from some 58 countries.
After graduating from UCLA, she became a time teacher with the Los Angeles Unified School District. She taught elementary and middle school, primarily English, French and history and also science and social science. She also coached the cheerleading teams and dance clubs. In the classroom, whatever the subject, she incorporated music, dance, visual art, drama, poetry or literature, she says.
“I always danced on the desk because my students couldn’t see me in the classroom,” she says. “In the arts you think outside the box. That’s a wonderful thing.”
During her decades of teaching at San Pedro’s South Shores Magnet School, Leland St. Elementary and Dana Middle School, she’s been recognized as a BRAVO Award finalist and Dance Educator of the Year and received the California Alliance for Arts Education’s Recognition Award in Dance.
She also trains aspiring teachers. She spent eight years in leadership roles in the California Dance Education Association, serving as president, and co-authored dance standards for LAUSD’s K-12 and PVUSD’s grades 6-8.
“So many people have passions, whether it’s writing, music, dance or visual arts,” Cantine notes. “Don’t say that if you’re teaching elementary school, ‘I have 33 subjects but can’t fit one more thing in.’ You can integrate the arts into your curriculum.”
In 2001, she retired from full-time teaching. But she’s still teaching, performing and choreographing. When she speaks of her students, her face lights up. She springs to her feet and points out specific students on her wall.
About 11 years ago, her adaptive PE class for special ed students at Peninsula High School expanded to a full, after-school dance program for young special needs individuals at the Palos Verdes Performing Arts Center. Called “Ready, Willing and Able,” she teaches tap, folk dance and ballroom to some 30 students paired with volunteer mentors from the local high schools. Their next showcase is the spring concert at the PVAC on May 28 at 4 p.m.
“We bring out the savant, the giftedness in each of the children,” Cantine says. “And I’m still discovering. So many of my students are musically and kinesthetically gifted.”
One student who wouldn’t even stay in class two years ago, she notes, is now leading her special performance class, called “Jazzy Tappers.”
“Just a couple weeks ago, one of my students did every dance with his upper body,” she notes proudly.
Cantine, who also teaches a weekly tap class for senior adults, called “Tap Happy,” considers PVPAC her second home. Over the years she has taken part in more than 200 productions, wearing every hat from dance captain to choreographer to house manager. She plans to wind down next year to spend more time with her husband, son, daughter-in-law and three grandchildren, but “I will always direct ‘Ready, Willing and Able’!” she notes.
“These are ways that I never thought I could share dance,” she says. “I think about how fortunate I’ve been. I don’t know what I would do without dance.” PEN
