PORT ANGELES — Instead of settling into her junior year at Port Angeles High School right about now, 16-year-old Cami Ortloff is catching the subway every day, traveling from borough to borough.
An alumna of both the Port Angeles Dance Center and the Sequim Ballet school, Cami has moved to New York City, where she’s a full-time student of the Gelsey Kirkland Academy of Classical Ballet.
She’ll dance all day at the academy in Brooklyn, then attend the Laurel Springs college preparatory school — online, at the Manhattan apartment she shares with a group of Gelsey Kirkland dancers.
Ask her how all of this feels, and Cami has no glib response; she just smiles.
Cami’s first dance teacher was Mary Marcial, owner of the Port Angeles Dance Center. They worked together from when Cami was 5 until she turned 13 and, Marcial recalled, was ready for a more intensive ballet program.
Marcial knew Laurel Herrera of Sequim Ballet could offer her this, so off she went to take every single class Herrera taught, even the ones for much younger students.
Last February, the Gelsey Kirkland Academy held auditions at the Pacific Northwest Ballet studio in Seattle, inviting dancers from across the Pacific Northwest to try out for its summer intensive and year-round program.
Cami was accepted to both. That surprised her teachers not at all.
“She was extremely shy when she was younger,” said Marcial, but even in elementary school, she had “the determination, the passion” a ballerina must possess.
“She just keeps tearing it up,” Marcial said.
And while Cami has the grit, she also has the limbs for it: just 5-foot-5, but “all legs and arms,” Marcial said.
Herrera also remembers watching Cami move through class.
When you see someone like this girl, “you absolutely know they’ve got it,” she said.
Cami is still “very quiet. She’s also very gracious, always,” Herrera added.
When the Port Angeles student first arrived at Sequim Ballet, she walked into a roomful of girls who’d been dancing there together since they were all about 5 years old.
“They were real cliquey,” Herrera said, yet Cami didn’t flinch.
“She’s never had an attitude.”
The teenager has devoted much of her free time to watching dancers from around the world.
Her parents, Todd and Kim Ortloff, have taken her to see live broadcasts of the Bolshoi Ballet at the Rose Theatre in Port Townsend and to performances by the Pacific Northwest Ballet at Seattle Center’s McCaw Hall.
Cami recalls seeing “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” there when she was very young.
“Amazing” is how she remembers it.
During the summer intensive at the Gelsey Kirkland Academy, Cami took weekly classes with Kirkland and even had a private lesson with her.
Kirkland herself was a girl of 15 when George Balanchine invited her to join the New York City Ballet.
That was 1968; four years later, she was a principal ballerina, dancing the lead in ballets such as “The Firebird” and, in Mikhail Baryshnikov’s 1977 televised production of “The Nutcracker,” the role of Clara.
Kirkland is also known for writing about the trials and triumphs of life as a ballet dancer in her memoirs, Dancing on My Grave and The Shape of Love.
The Gelsey Kirkland Academy felt right, Cami’s mother said, because of its emphasis on the artistic, storytelling elements of ballet — rather than on producing dancers who fit a uniform look.
The bone-thin ballerina is a Balanchine thing, Kim added. Kirkland’s academy, by contrast, is “not focused on the super-thin body style.”
Cami hasn’t decided yet what she’ll do when she’s finished her academic year in New York.
After high school graduation, she could pursue a contract with a professional dance company or go to college first.
For now, she’s concentrating on the immediate things, such as her pointe shoes. First you have them fitted, then you beat on them with a hammer to soften and quiet them.
“They cost $75 per pair, and I go through them every two weeks,” she added.
The dance shoes will see her through her classes — pointe, pas de deux, classical variations, character dance — while she learns another form of discipline at the academy.
Gelsey Kirkland “offers intensive training programs aimed at the full cultural development of the young artist,” according to www.gelseykirklandacademyofclassicalballet.org.
Technical skills are taught, yes, and they are “coupled with that elusive quality known as the artist’s ‘sensitivity of the soul.’”
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
