Las Vegas Fern Adair Conservatory creates boys-only Gladiator-style training program

The Fern Adair Conservatory of the Arts, 3265 E. Patrick Lane, has been teaching girls and boys, but mostly girls, the finer points of dance and gymnastics for 43 years. Recently, it decided to try something new and train gladiators.

The new gym and dance program, Gladiators Training, is a first for the conservatory: It’s a boys-only class.

“It’s a guy’s course, taught by guys for guys,” said Andrew Phillips, the coordinator of the Gladiator program. “We stay away from the word ‘dance’ and ballet terms. We make it fun and manly, and we do hope that some of our students will go on to do dance also, but that’s not the goal. The goal is to get kids off of the couch and out doing healthy things.”

The girls aren’t excluded from the activities that the boys do in the class; in fact, there are classes that involve equipment and techniques that Fern Adair, the conservatory’s founder and namesake, hopes will eventually be folded into the Gladiator course. The course was created in part to give the boys something they could do with other boys that was geared to their particular interests. The Gladiator course is multifaceted, focusing on athletic dance, gymnastics and visual memory.

“We try to infuse hip-hop, breakdancing and basic tumbling skills,” Phillips said. “We hope to advance to later tumbling skills eventually. We finish each session with an obstacle course.”

The hip-hop and breakdance section of the class is taught in one of the long dance rooms with hardwood floors and floor-to-ceiling mirrors.

“In that part, they are breaking down counts, learning to feel the music and work out their timing,” Phillips said. “They’re learning isolation of parts of the body and how to get the hip-hop flow and funk and how to retain visual choreography.”

Adair created the venue for this kind of specialized training. She was already running three dance studios when she came to Las Vegas in 1961 for a dance teachers’ convention and fell in love with the city. She went home, closed up her businesses and relocated to Las Vegas. Her original location was in nearby Tropicana Plaza, but when the business had expanded to eight storefronts in 1986, she decided it was time to create the current purpose-built location.

“I decided I wanted to be a dance teacher when I was 5, and I never changed,” Adair said. “I did decide I needed some practical experience if I was going to teach, and I toured with the USO in Alaska and all through the Pacific and Asia. I loved it, but teaching was always the plan.”

The current Gladiator class is still in its early sessions, and the students are working on basic handstands, front flips and roundoffs. Phillips was a kinesiology major, which is the study of movement.

“There are several scientific studies that have proven that the study of gymnastics and dance is good for visual learning and that those skills translate into areas you might not expect, like spelling,” Phillips said. “Many professional athletes study dance and/or gymnastics to give themselves a greater ability to jump towards a basketball hoop or dodge an opponent. We also have them running in the obstacle course, which builds up stamina for things like soccer.”

The obstacle course is often the same for two or three weeks before being rearranged into another challenge. The students are timed. It’s a competitive event, but for the most part, the students are competing against themselves, trying to beat their own previous time.

“Each obstacle course ends with jumping into the foam pit,” Phillips said. “The guys love it, and it’s real adventurous. Climbing out of the foam pit is a killer.”

The pit consists of a hole full of polyurethane foam blocks. A fast track trampoline leads into the pit, and assorted gymnastics equipment can be installed adjacent to the pit. On a recent visit, a wooden bar stretched across one corner of the pit, and some of the boys were leaping higher and farther than seemed possible to reach the bar, swing up and over it and then swing out to disappear into the foam blocks.

The goal is to eventually have so many students that they can break the class into younger and older students so that the older students can do more challenging activities.

“A lot of these little girls have brothers who are dragged along to wait in the lobby,” Adair said. “This program is an opportunity for those boys. It gives these boys and young men a focus of their own that is just for them. It’s all about what they want to do.”

Visit fernadair.com.

To reach East Valley View reporter F. Andrew Taylor, email ataylor@viewnews.com or call 702-380-4532.