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 The
60-Years-and-Up Club: Eleanor Rubino
By Lisa Traiger
Championing etiquette and personal pride, along with dance, in
East Boston
A clump of pink-tighted girls scatters like bowling pins when
Eleanor Rubino walks into her East Boston studio. They quickly
take their places at the barre, standing expectant, ready to
work. Rubino, 79, is a no-nonsense teacher, and the advanced
ballet classes at her Eleanor Rubino Academy of Performing
Arts challenge body and mind. Her students know there’s no
fooling around while Eleanor is in the room.
“Within my school they learn discipline; they learn
confidence; they learn poise,” Rubino says. “In fact, I feel
that my school gives them more than just dance. It isn’t just
dance. I was a strict mother with my children and I said, ‘I’m
not going into my studios to take abuse from another child.’ ”
A mother of four, grandmother of four, and great-grandmother
of two, she knows about raising children. The thousands of
youngsters who have walked through the doors of her studio
have reaped rewards far beyond a cut-and-dried dance class,
not merely because Rubino is a disciplinarian but because she
loves her students dearly.
In 2007 Rubino, who has taught generations of students ballet,
jazz, lyrical, acrobatics, and tap, celebrates her 60th year
as a dance teacher. At her school’s recent recital, more than
75 former students, up to 68 years old, came back to share the
stage with her current crop of dancers. Some of her students,
like one-time Radio City Music Hall Rockette Teri DiGianfelice
Thomas of Clifton, NJ, who also danced in Broadway’s
Footloose, credit Rubino for their careers.
“How do you say thank you to the person who taught you
everything you needed for your career?” muses Thomas, 32, who
now teaches in New Jersey. She elevates her dance
teacher above her high school English, math, and
science teachers, because Rubino was there for the long haul.
Thomas started taking tap and acrobatics at age 3; when her
mother couldn’t afford the tuition, Rubino allowed mother and
daughter to clean the studio in exchange for classes.
But the great majority of Rubino’s students mark their
successes outside the dance world. For this teacher, that
matters even more. She is equally proud of those who became
teachers, doctors, police officers, lawyers, writers, parents,
members of the community. And they, too, attribute their
success to their old-fashioned dance teacher, who used to use
a cane to mark the beat for her pianist— and straighten an
errant leg. “She was very strict, a disciplinarian,” says
Rubino’s daughter, Paula Terenzi of Malden, MA, who danced in
her
mother’s recital for the 45th time this year. “A lot of
students credit my mother with their success because of the
respect that she demanded.”
“It wasn’t my intention to reach 60 years as a teacher,” says
Rubino. “I’ve just kept on teaching—I was very busy just doing
it. And I’ve been lucky to have my health.”
Born in Chelsea, MA, Rubino came from a large Italian
immigrant family. As a child she
followed her older sister to dance class at Mi ldred
Sacco’s studio, also in East Boston. “I can remember very
distinctly that at the first lesson I did nothing but cry and
cry and cry,” she says. “And then I couldn’t wait to go back.
That’s how I got started. I was about 5 or 6.” She’s been
dancing nonstop ever since.
Rubino’s most important dance moment came when she received a
scholarship from her teacher to study in New York at the newly
minted School of American Ballet, the illustrious academy
founded by George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. She knew
from the start that teaching dance was her calling. “I knew I
had to
do something with dancing,” she explains. “I was always a
little heavy and I knew I couldn’t be a professional because
at that time you had to be so thin. So I thought I’d like to
open a school to pass on my knowledge.”
Immediately after graduation she left for New York, and the
experience remains a touchstone for her. “I had classes every
day in ballet, character, and music [at SAB], and then I went
at night to Jack Stanly for tap and acrobatics. I had the
best: Freddy Franklin, Muriel Stuart, Jack. Students today
don’t know what they’re missing.”
She remembers the day she took class with Balanchine himself.
“I was an all-around dancer,” she says. “I wasn’t a ballerina.
I had one class with George Balanchine, a character class, and
at the end he asked everyone to do a row of cartwheels. Of
course, I had no problem; I took acrobatics. The other girls
were strictly ballerinas and doing cartwheels—well! When I
finished my cartwheels [Balanchine] pointed a finger at me and
said to the group, ‘Now you see, there is nothing wrong with a
ballerina turning herself upside down.’ That was his way of
letting the students know that doing other things is not
terrible.”
Back in Boston, Rubino put her refined ballet, jazz, and acrobatic
skills to work. At 18 she opened her first studio, a
fourth-floor walkup in East Boston that
she rented for $100 a month. Through trial and error she built
a clientele. “I ha d
very little guidance,”
she remarks. “My parents didn’t know anything about business.
I learned a lot on the way.”
One of Rubino’s early students was Gerri Holden, now 62, of
Derry, NH. She started off at age 4 1/2 with lessons in ballet
and acrobatics. “She’s been a wonderful
influence,” says Holden. “It was the values she instilled in
us. It was like going to a finishing school and learning how
to
be a dancer at the same time. We knew how to behave.” Today Rubino
counts Holden, who sent her three daughters to the Rubino
Academy, among
her closest friends. Rubino now teaches her former student’s
great granddaughter, making it four generations with one
teacher.
This old-school teacher ran such a tight ship that she never
hired another teacher until her daughter was a teenager and
old enough to assist her. Today Terenzi teaches middle-school
dance in the public schools and oversees her own studio, Paula
Terenzi’s Dance Complex, a mere 15 minutes away.
The Rubino Academy remains in its longtime location on Brook
Street in East Boston. It is, by the founder’s own admission,
a modest studio with perhaps 100 students. “I don’t have a lot
of students if you count them by bodies, but if you count them
by classes—a lot of them take three or four classes a week—it
triples.” But more important than how many students she has,
Rubino emphasizes, “I know the names of my students.”
Though Terenzi has noticed her mother easing up in recent
years, Rubino still goes to the studio almost daily, rehearses
her academy competition teams, and teaches
a high-level summer ballet intensive for the most serious
students. What keeps her coming back? “It’s her passion,”
Terenzi says. “She’s always had a passion for dance.”
Terenzi concedes that her mother may have softened a bit over
the years, but Rubino
still sticks to her guns about classroom etiquette. F or
example, when one of her recent winning competition teams
arrived at rehearsal the next week to take a celebratory photo
for the newspaper, their teacher hit the ceiling. “I looked at
them with their summer sandals on, with their hair down in
their eyes, their jackets rolled up to the elbows,” she
reports. “I said, ‘Look at yourselves—you don’t look nice at
all. I would be embarrassed to put your picture in the paper
dressed like that.’ ” She sent them off to change, but the
reprimand didn’t end there. Each student had to write her a
letter on personal pride. And, Rubino continues, “When half of
them didn’t know what that meant, I told them that this isn’t
just about pride in your dance; it’s about pride in the way
you present yourself, the way you speak, the way you look.”
Photo captions (from top to bottom):
Rubino (right) celebrates her 75th birthday with best friend
Shirley Penta.
Eleanor Rubino (top left) as a young dance student at the
Mildred Sacco School in East Boston.
As president of Dance Teachers Club of Boston, Rubino presided
over a dinner honoring choreographer Robert Joffrey in 1968.
Choreographer Brian Friedman drew an admiring crowd of
Rubino’s students when he gave a master class in Peabody, MA,
in 2006.
All photos courtesy Eleanor Rubino
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