The East Los Angeles Performing Arts Academy opened as neighborhood pilot school in the Fall of 2010.  The mission of our school is to develop creative, contributing members of society through a standards-based curriculum featuring rigorous interdisciplinary instruction that is rich in the performing arts.

Our commitment to the arts led us through the process of becoming an arts Magnet school in 2014.  We are now the only arts magnet on the East side of Los Angeles.

All students at our school take a dance class in order to earn their Physical Education Credit, however very few students enter the school with any formal training in dance.

The ELAPA Dance Company is the advanced dance class at the East Los Angeles Performing Arts Magnet and students in this class must audition to get into the class.  The class is made up of 35 students in the 10th-12th grades who study a variety of dance forms each school day for ninety minutes.

Every two years the ELAPA Dance Company presents a jazzy, contemporary, hip-hop version of the holiday classic "The Nutcracker."  For this performance the students collaborate with each other and with teachers to create original choreography to remixed versions of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker music.

We applied for the grant with the specific purpose of buying costumes that we would be able to use for our next Nutcracker performance in December of 2016, but many of the costumes have already been used in our most recent dance performances.

The Dance Company performs in three major school performances each year as well as small performances at festivals and other events in the Los Angeles community.  Making sure all of the students have costumes for each performance is challenging as our students cannot afford to buy dance clothes, shoes, tights and other costume items.   Receiving this grant enabled us to purchase a matching set of black unitards for all of the girls in the class and matching sweatpants for all of the boys.  In addition to those basic items, we were able to purchase several specific costumes that will allow for more students to be involved in our Nutcracker performances next Winter.  All the of costumes that were purchased will be reused in multiple performances for several years, and our core group of dancers will be joined in larger group performances with additional dancers in our after-school programs.  

Here is a picture of dancers performing in March 2016 wearing some of the costumes that were purchased with the grant money.

We are so excited and thankful to have new costumes to add to our previously limited costume collection.  

Here are pictures of some of the fancier costumes that will be more specific to the Nutcracker performances:

Here is a video that was created by our students in 2014 as part of a dream sequence that was used in our last live performance of the Nutcracker.  We intend to make a new video at the Huntington Gardens in the Fall of 2016.