When Mary Marcial was a young girl suffering a deep loss, dance served as her sustenance.
And in the years since, Marcial has taught hundreds of girls and young women how to not only do all the right steps, but also to find their own strength, the strength that carries them through the difficult and the joyful parts of life.
Marcial, who will mark her 20th anniversary as the woman behind the Port Angeles Dance Center with a pair of performances next weekend, has been dreaming up choreography ever since she was a grade-schooler in California. She’d sing while roller-skating in her driveway and create a dance in the process.
When she was 11, her family moved to Evanston, Ill., and a year later, her father died.
She was taking dance classes at the time and remembers well how they nurtured her. No one talked about her dad’s death; instead, Mary and her classmates kept developing their dance skills.
She recalls too the feeling of freedom: “I could jump as high as I wanted” from the dance floor.
By the time she entered Evanston Township High School, a large campus just north of Chicago, Marcial had expanded beyond ballet to jazz dance. She was part of the school’s full-blown musical productions, put on each year with a big orchestra and costumes brought in from New York City.
Marcial had started out a shy, skinny kid. But “I thrived in that environment” at ETHS, she remembers. “There was so much access to music.”
Marcial entered college as a music major — but in voice. She also loved to sing, and so began her studies at Stanford University, where there was no dance program.
“I had really underestimated how attached I was” to the latter form of expression, she recalls.
After a year and a half at Stanford, she returned home to Evanston, having transferred to Northwestern University, aka the Harvard of the Midwest. She was still majoring in voice, but soon auditioned for and won a position with a student-run dance group.
Some time later, she switched her major to communications — and kept dancing. The student company was “a great training ground” for the two years until Marcial graduated.
Like most dancers, however, Marcial had to find additional work, lots of it, to pay the bills. She got a job waitressing at the Chicago Pizza & Oven Grinder Co., a historic eatery in the city’s Lincoln Park district.
There, she met the man who would become her partner in life, even as onlookers predicted that it wouldn’t last.
Narciso Marcial was a busboy, and he was from a background that she describes as just about the opposite of her own. “He was born in Mexico, extremely poor, from a small town,” while her family were academic types from Chicago.
The Marcials have been married 28 years now. They first moved to Albuquerque, N.M., a kind of middle ground between their families, where “we could become who we were,” Mary says.
Then her mother, Peggy Smith, retired and moved to Sequim in 1987, and the Marcials welcomed their second child, Catalina, in 1990.
“My mom started this huge campaign,” Marcial recalls. “Every day in the mail, there would be a flier about something on the North Olympic Peninsula.”
By 1991, the Marcials had come to Port Angeles.
While Narciso began building a landscaping business, Mary taught dance at the Clallam County YMCA to preschoolers and kindergartners, including her older daughter Adriana, then 4. As the girls grew, so did the classes; Marcial moved to the basement of the Elks Naval Lodge, and then onto the second floor of the now-vacant brick building on Lincoln Street.
Today, Marcial, 55, teaches 16 of the 17 classes offered each week at the Port Angeles Dance Center, in the Front Street studios next to Olympic Stationers. She offers introduction to dance for the 4-year-old set, on up to Ballet IV for high school students. This year’s spring performance, titled “Every Age, One Stage,” brings together all of her classes — more than 80 dancers — at the Port Angeles High School auditorium.
Therein lies one of the qualities that makes Marcial a rare teacher, says Barb Maynes of Port Angeles. Her two daughters, Meg Bohman, 17, and Abby Bohman, 15, are Port Angeles Dance Center students, and Maynes has admired Marcial for years. Meg is one of the girls graduating from both high school and the dance center this month. The other seniors include Jenn Boesenberg, Ann Grover, Jordan MacIntosh, Kelly Norris, Emily Oldenkamp and Kirby Uranich.
Marcial’s ability to tune in to each of her students, Maynes says, has created an environment that allows them to bloom.
“I am so not a dancer. But she used to have adult jazz classes, and I took them for a couple of years. It completely amazed me,” how Marcial was able to teach her moves she’d thought were beyond her.
Maynes had been in her high school marching band — not the usual preparation for jazz dance. At the Port Angeles Dance Center, she was in a class with women who had grown up doing those jazz steps. Somehow, Marcial “made it a safe place for all of us.”
Maynes also admired how Marcial related to girls across the age spectrum, from squirmy 4-year-olds to antsy high school seniors.
“She is really able to meet each person on his or her level,” says Maynes.
Marcial teaches the importance of fitness, Maynes adds — without being judgmental about body type. And for this dance teacher, it’s all about affirmation, not competition.
“People will try to compete. They just will. But I really try to work against that. I don’t think it’s healthy,” Marcial says. “It’s counterproductive.”
Some of this year’s graduating seniors will dance solos in the spring show, and their teacher has given them the opportunity to choreograph those performances. Some chose to collaborate, either with Marcial or with another dancer.
“I discourage competition. But I do expect them to work hard — for themselves,” she adds.
And when a girl has truly stretched, physically and mentally, there comes a moment when she crosses over. Marcial sees it often: In the early days, the student learns the steps, but she’s merely executing them, her heart still sheathed.
Then, one day, she comes on stage and dances, as Marcial puts it, “from the inside out.”
“When the moms watch their girls,” at this moment, “they see something they’ve never seen before,” Marcial says. “They see her do a leap; they never knew their [daughter] could do that.”
A mom might ask, “Wow, what happened?”
“It’s her year,” is Marcial’s answer.
She takes care to add that this change is not about physical appearance. It is about a particular kind of inner strength.
Marcial believes that is something women need as they go out into the world, whatever their chosen profession.
Her daughter Adriana, 24, is a performer with Mordine & Co. Dance Theater in Chicago; she is also the company’s marketing director, a program assistant for the Chicago Dancemakers Forum and a certified yoga instructor.
Marcial’s daughter Catalina, 20, is finishing her nursing degree at the University of Washington, working at Olympic Medical Center and raising her little girl, Amara.
“When you’re a dancer, you have to do it all,” Marcial says.
And while her goal has never been to train ballerinas, she teaches her students that the ballet barre is home. Ballet positions, she emphasizes, are the foundation for expansive motion.
The act of learning builds confidence from within, along with an appreciation of music — “and it’s just joyful,” she says.
Last year, though, was a challenging one. Marcial had both hips replaced: the first in January and the second in June.
She led classes till the Friday before her surgery, and then came back four weeks later to resume teaching. Now, “I’m reincarnated,” she quips.
Marcial admits that she never thought she would be teaching this long. But “I just thrive in this environment,” she says. “I love all the ages,” from the kindergartners to the soon-to-be-graduates.
“I get very attached to my students,” she says, though she adds quickly they need to move on after high school, “to become who they are.”
Marcial herself learned something about feminine fortitude from her mother. Peggy, who still lives in Sequim, became a single mom to four children back in the 1960s, when single women faced resistance when they tried to do things like open a bank account. She encouraged her daughters, Mary and Katie, to keep studying dance, however.
“She deserves the credit for getting us started,” Marcial says, “and for getting us to move here.”
Twenty years later, she feels gratitude for the variety of students who come to dance with her.
“They’ve found their way here, somehow,” Marcial says, “and it’s always a compliment when they stay.”
