Brian Vernon will never forget his first visit to the townships surrounding Cape Town, South Africa. It was worse than he imagined. Miles of miserable, overcrowded shanties made from tin, cardboard and flattened milk jugs. People filling buckets of water from dirty street gutters. Women cooking chicken on an open fire in a garbage can.

But what was unforgettable about this visit, Vernon says, was that he forgot these terrible images as soon as he came in contact with some of the township children who had gathered in the village’s only substantial building – a combination church and schoolhouse – for their daily dancing class. “I was so blown away by the talent and the spirit of these children that I completely forgot the overwhelming emotions of horror I felt at being where I was for the first time.”

Vernon, who joined the Coastal faculty as assistant professor of theater and dance last year, has made two subsequent trips to South Africa to teach dance in the township slums since his initial visit in 1998, most recently in May 2001, and he plans to go back for six weeks every summer (our summer, their winter). His work there is part of Dance For All, an education and development outreach program for township children sponsored by the Cape Town City Ballet.

Vernon’s involvement in the program came about by accident. He went to South Africa in the summer of 1998 with a friend who was engaged to choreograph an opera in Grahmstown. Vernon, who was teaching in Colorado then, was state representative of the International Tap Association (ITA). He contacted ITA’s Johannesburg representative and offered to donate some of his spare time to teaching while he was in South Africa.

The ITA put him to work in Johannesburg. From there, he went on to Cape Town to witness his friend’s rehearsals of the Grahmstown opera. Through various activities associated with the rehearsing of the opera, Vernon met Philip Boyd, retired principal dancer of the Cape Town City Ballet and founder-director of the Dance For All project. Boyd invited Vernon to accompany him to the township slums to observe a class. Many of Vernon’s friends in South Africa and in the states had advised him against going into the townships, where random and brutal acts of violence – remnants of apartheid – are frequent.

“The kids were so good it gave me chills,” he said. “They’re better than most American students of the same age who have trained twice as long as they have.” Vernon believes this is due not only to a long tradition of native dance in South Africa, but because the children are “hungry to learn.” On the plane home after the first trip, bound for America, Vernon couldn’t stop thinking about the children – their commitment and enthusiasm, the way the dynamics of the dingy room changed when they began dancing. When he returned to the states, he e-mailed Boyd and asked him what he could do to help support the program. “Come back and teach,” Boyd said.

Although Vernon receives some financial support as a Dance For All visiting professor, his fees do not cover the cost of his visits. “But that’s not what this is about. Reward is a relative thing, and I feel I get more than I give whenever I’m teaching those kids.”

The students, who range from six to 15 years old, haven’t been exposed to much traditional Western culture, “so ballet, tap, jazz and modern dance are something new and strange and exotic to them,” says Vernon. More than 400 children are involved in the Dance For All project, which is now being offered in five townships in South Africa. When the program was conceived nine years ago, its sponsors saw it largely as an exercise in civic do-goodism – a well-meaning way to keep children off the streets, teach them self-discipline and instill in them a sense of self worth. Under Boyd’s passionate direction, however, the program has achieved that and a great deal more.

“These kids could be professional dancers anywhere in the world,” says Vernon. One of them, Theo Ndindwa, is now with the Birmingham Royal Ballet Company in England. More than two-thirds of the students are male; the opposite ratio is common in the states, according to Vernon. “In South Africa, male kids aren’t stigmatized for taking formal dance classes – they are more likely to be criticized for being involved in an activity that is looked upon as Western or Eurocentric.”

Looking back on his involvement in Dance For All, Vernon says he feels ashamed for the people in Cape Town who first told him never to go into a township. “It’s beyond me how they could turn away their eyes and ignore what’s happening around them,” he says, remembering an afternoon when he and his class went out and helped to reconstruct a decrepit shanty where one of the students’ family lived. “Everyone should have this experience.”