How the Time Danced By

Newsday
February 24, 2003

Posey School
has been on its
toes for
50 years.

By Liza N. Burby

Elsa Posey glides across the studio floor with the grace of a ballerina, back straight, arms lifting as she reaches the ballet barre. She is demonstrating.

She reaches over to lightly raise a girl's arms overhead, correcting the child's position, speaking firmly, yet gently. Posey smiles her approval, then turns to the next student. "Very nice; you're getting stronger," she tells the girl, who grins.

On this Saturday morning, sun streams through the floor-to-ceiling windows in a former third-floor ballroom at 57 Main Street in Northport. The music of Josu Gallastegui, a pianist from Manhattan, swells in the background.

The serene atmosphere and Posey's soft-spoken persona belie the sheer nerve and determination that led her, at 14, to open the school that has become as much a part of the landscape in the town as the boats docking in the harbor. Fifty years ago this month, Posey opened her after-school dance program in Northport to earn money for her ballet classes with George Balanchine.

Under her direction, the Posey School would grow, expand into new locations around the Island, make a name for itself in the world of professional dance, and be the first to bring the Nutcracker Ballet to Long Island.

"Posey School has a reputation for being the finest school outside of New York City," says Peff Modelski, who teaches ballet at Steps in Manhattan. "It's a training school that has sent the students to the top dance schools in the country and set the standard for the quality of dance education...All you have to say is someone came from the Posey School, and everyone takes notice."

Posey began taking ballet at age 7 to help cure her flat feet. Her 4-year-old sister Jacqueline came along. Soon the Posey girls were performing at USO shows at Mitchell Field, the Brooklyn Naval Yard, and the Northport Veterans Hospital. In 1953, the teenage Posey attended a conference at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan on teaching creative dance to children, sparkling the idea that she could teach, too.

By the late '60's and into the early '70's, Posey School had an enrollment of 750 to 900 and a large faculty. To hear former students speak of Posey is to hear a reverence for a woman whom they all say changed their lives.

"She was like a mother to me. She even let me live with her when my family lost their house for financial reasons," says Toni Ann Gardella, a former ballerina with the Metropolitan Opera Company, who began taking classes with Posey in 1968.

She approached the director of music at the Veterans Hospital, Joseph Sciarrino, to ask if he would give her space in his new Northport School of Music on Scudder Avenue. "She bowled me over with her interest and vibrancy," say Sciarrino, who is 78 and now lives in Florida. But by 1954, she needed more space and moved around the corner to 8 Union Place, becoming the youngest tenant in town.

Her first mission was to offer a complete education in dance, she says. "I recognized quite early what dance had done for me -- my ability to organize, self-discipline -- and I didn't understand why every child didn't have that chance. From the beginning, I wasn't interested in teaching children to perform but to help them incorporate dance as a part of their lives."

Meanwhile, Posey was intent upon becoming a professional dancer, attending classes in Manhattan at the School of American Ballet, among others, as well as classes in jazz, theater and mime, while still attending Northport High School. On the afternoons she wasn't in the city, she taught classes in her school.

When she graduated from high school in 1956, Posey and her sister headed for the city, living in a one-room apartment. Elsa studied with ABT while Jacqueline studied modern dance and learned to be a comedienne. And every weekend Elsa commuted to Northport to teach.

The commute ended in 1960 when she married. "In 1960, you couldn't be married and be a dancer. Even today it's not easy," she says. "I dedicated myself to teaching dance."

She moved her school to larger quarters at 57 Main Street, where she remains today. "Miss Posey opened her school at a time in which Northport was in transition, when many storefronts were empty and baymen and other workers shared the town with celebrities like Jackie Gleason and businessmen like lawyers," says George Wallace, curator of the historical society. "She's part of the vanguard in which Northport became their home of creative people, when drama and music studios were along Main Street as well."

Her downstairs neighbor was painter Stanley Twardowicaz, with whom she shared the space for over 20 years and who frequently hosted his friend Jack Kerouac.

Within a year of moving onto Main Street, Posey School of Dance became a nonprofit corporation, so she could produce performances for in-school programs that promoted dance education. She opened branches of her school in Smithtown and Huntington, then in St. James and Cold Spring Harbor.

Photo left: Elizabeth O'Donnell, 14,
stretches during ballet practice.
(photo by Alejandra Villa)

In photo above center, Elsa Posey works with a dance student at Posey School. (photo by Alejandra Villa)

When Posey brought the Nutcracker Ballet to Long Island, it was performed two weekends each year in Northport and Huntington High Schools with 60 local dancers. She also formed the Long Island Ballet to bring in more professional dancers and produce several concerts through the Huntington Art Council and the New York State Arts Council. The Long Island Ballet was disbanded in 1980 due to rising costs of productions and dancers' salaries.

While the Northport school was serving a new generation of students in the '80's, Posey included national work in her schedule. In 1983, she was appointed president of the American Dance Guild, of which she was a founding member. "I spent the next 15 years researching issues involving dance schools in the private sector and the dance educators who worked at these schools," she said.

Her research led to the founding of the National Registry of Dance Educators Inc. in 1996, through which dance educators voluntarily license themselves to maintain professional responsibility and safe teaching practices.

By this time, Posey had made the decision to close all but her Northport studio. She hired Denise Teller Cook of Kings Park, who began with her as an adult modern dance student, as director of early childhood dance education, and the curriculum was expanded.

The school emphasizes "structure, freedom, creativity and self-discipline," said Cook. "This is how Elsa wants to leave the world a better place by making this kind of dance education available to all children. She has refused to compromise these principles. She has made history in dance education."