Let’s dance: At the CAS, students earn pointes for their pirouettes

Beatriz arrives in Karachi to instruct dance at the CAS and Act One.

KARACHI: Slender manicured feet highlighted by fire-engine red toenails peek out from four-inch silver stilettos. Beatriz Georgina Franco Gonzalez stomps her feet — but with grace. Beatriz, or Betty, and her partner Hazan D float across the charcoal grey tiles of the basement of the Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS) on Thursday afternoon. They lock in a waltz and flamenco, attracting an audience: awe-struck first graders with mouths and eyes wide open.

“What are you staring at?” question teachers passing by. But the students can’t bring themselves to tear away.

Thirty-two-year-old Betty was invited to Pakistan from Mexico by Act One to teach the students the tango, samba, flamenco, rumba, cha cha and meringue. She has 11 years of ballet under her belt as well and has mastered folk dances from seven Latin American countries, including Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela.

“With Betty’s help, we have re-introduced ballet classes at the CAS as part of our module programme and we hope to incorporate some of the other dance styles,” explained Junior Section Headmistress Kashfa Samad. The school’s moto is ‘making a paradigm shift’ which means that it has added modules such as ballet and ballroom dancing to help students become more confident.

There is a lot of excitment at the school. Thirteen-year-old Shaharyar Farooqui, who performed a boy’s Spanish number at the school’s recent Spanish Day, squealed, “[Betty’s] an amazing dancer!”

But beautiful and mysterious as Betty may be, she’s making the children work. Another student quipped, “It’s good fun, but it’s also very tough and we train forever.”

As if to commiserate, Betty cries, “Aye, mi ninos!” [Oh my little ones] as she tells them about the tale of the Spanish legend in which a mother drowns her children and kills herself after her husband rejects her. She struggles a little with English but manages to explain the important point that her hobby is: “Dance, dance and dance!” She hopes, however, to pick up kathak and some Bollywood moves while on her visit.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 11^th, 2011.