For Arsen Serobian, it's all dance, all the time
DANCE
The classical dancer wants to be a force in the art form, not by performing but through his website: DanceChannelTV.com
ON the stage of the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, members of the Moiseyev Dance Company are rehearsing ensemble routines, watched intently by Elena A. Shcherbakova, the troupe's director and assistant choreographer.
Filming her comments to the dancers on a professional hand-held video rig is Arsen Serobian, a young, locally based Armenian classical dancer and teacher who briefly studied at the Moiseyev school in Moscow before training at the Bolshoi Ballet Academy and joining the company that brought him to the U.S. in 1997.
He stayed and five years later became a citizen, by which time he'd decided that he wanted to be a force in the dance world -- but not as a performer. No, with an interest and skills in computers, Serobian began to investigate the ways that dance -- all kinds of dance -- might mate with new technologies to reach a larger audience than at any time in history. And that research led him to buy that expensive video camera and launch a new career.
In a Cerritos dressing room, he smiles as he films Shcherbakova telling interviewer Steve Barry, in English, about the Moiseyev emphasis on "training that goes beyond technique into acting and understanding different cultures. When you are on the stage," she says, "you need to understand what you are doing from the inside."
That smile comes from recognizing a kindred sprit, for Serobian often says the same thing when he's teaching ballet at the Colburn School in downtown L.A. or explaining why he finds so much American classicism under-rehearsed and under-coached. At 30, he's still sought after as a dancer by local companies -- especially at "Nutcracker" time, when classical princes with pristine Russian style are at a premium.
But performing and teaching are strictly Serobian sidelines these days, the means to pay the rent on the combination TV studio and editing room in North Hollywood where he sleeps a few hours a night. For the last two years, Serobian's passion has been DanceChannelTV.com, a website conceived as a television station, one devoted completely to dance. He is the founder and president, and he designed the site, recruited the volunteer staff and shoots, edits and sometimes subtitles the footage for the features that make DanceChannelTV.com closely resemble a cable TV outlet.
