By STAFF WRITER, The Nassau Guardian

After 10 years of dance education as an institution and nearly seven months of practice by this year's crop of students, C. V. Bethel Senior High School will put its dance students on stage for its first public performance.

The production "Free to Dance," will feature what 85 students have managed to grasp and perfect during the school year, an effort that dance teacher Robert Bain called an accomplishment within itself.

"What people see at the end of a production is nothing like what it actually takes to create it," he said.

Performances will be held at the National Theatre for the Performing Arts on Shirley Street on April 11 and 12. Both shows begin at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $10 for students and $15 for regular admission. Bain urged the public to come out and support the students.

The show will feature "everything but ballet," Bain described. "It's really diverse." Students will perform some 20 pieces that they have painstakingly practiced and memorized during the past two terms. "For each piece of choreography, for me it's like writing a book. And for them it's like memorizing every chapter of that book."

The students are also the 2007 dance winners of the E. Clement Bethel National Arts Festival.

Dance education at the school is part of the Performing Arts Department headed by Liz Thornton. The department also includes music in the form of band and voice. Music students do BJC, BGCSE and Royal School of Music exams while dance students are tested through the Royal Academy of Dance. Bain hopes to see national examinations in dance some day.

A veteran dancer and proponent of dance education in the country, Bain said that dance is a subject that encompasses so many others in the school's curriculum. "First of all there's a foreign language involved ... it involves anatomy ... it involves music, basically whatever you can think of. It involves math, you have to be able to count."

Beyond entertainment and even education, dance is also used for therapy, Bain noted. Students are excited about the up-coming concert, which their teacher believes will transform them. Assigning each student to any number of pieces based on his or her strengths, Bain thinks that the stage performance will increase their confidence.

"I always say to my students that if you're not going to be a dancer, as a result of this experience you're going to become one of the greatest supporters of the arts because you understand much better than most persons."