Brown-Bag goes Highbrow
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Zina Bethune has taken culture to new heights in Woodland Hills.
The diminutive ballerina spoke during a lunchtime dance demonstration for office workers Wednesday, 20 stories up on the empty top floor of Warner Center’s tallest building.
Dancers leaped and twirled to the music of “Swan Lake” and “Giselle” against a strikingly spectacular backdrop of West Valley commercial centers, neighborhoods and mountains. Their audience sat on folding chairs and munched catered sandwiches between pirouettes and plies.
The vacant penthouse is the setting for Warner Center’s new “Brown-Bag Series,” a monthly lecture program designed to acquaint people with their neighbors and overcome the feeling of isolation experienced by those who work in the Valley’s fastest-growing business area.
The lunchtime events were started last fall for the 2,500 workers in the high-rise at 21600 Oxnard St. The shows were opened to persons throughout the 90-acre Warner Center when interest spread.
“This is a terrific way to spend the lunch hour,” said Karen Duncan, a legal secretary who works on the fifth floor. “I’m in a small office. It’s nice to know there are other people who work here.”
The programs are financed by the Voit Companies, the owner of the building. The expensive, 19,000-square-foot top floor is being used because it is expected to be the last part of the building to be rented.
Culture is taken to new heights in a penthouse lecture series for Warner Center office workers. Company President Robert D. Voit said he started the series to help workers overcome the isolation of life in the express elevator.
“Buildings and landscaping are dead unless you breathe life into them,” Voit said. “It is particularly that way in a high-rise, where people silently go up and down.”
Lunchtime topics are selected on the basis of “what we think people in an office environment might be interested in--culture, education, stress management,” he said.
Voit said the hardest part is scheduling the lunches. “Not everybody takes the same time off,” he said.
“We’re not their boss, just the landlord. We really have to orchestrate the programs carefully so people aren’t late getting back from lunch. Sometimes, the programs get a bit rushed.”
For that reason, Bethune had to hurry to trace the development of ballet for her audience. Dancers Ted Nelson and Joanna DiGiavanna demonstrated steps linking 17th Century ballet to modern break-dancing.
Bethune, 33, of Studio City did not have time to tell how she personally overcame a dysplastic hips birth defect to become a ballerina with the New York City Ballet and the Royal Danish Symphony.
“I was born with everything that said I wouldn’t be a dancer,” Bethune said after the performance. “Every surgeon who sees my X-rays says, ‘You can’t dance.’ But I have, all my life. Some doctors have told me that, if I hadn’t danced, I’d have been a cripple.”
Last year, Bethune underwent her third and fourth hip operations, emerging with stainless steel hip balls and sockets. “I’m afraid now to walk near a magnet,” she joked.
These days, Bethune works as an actress and artistic director of her own eight-member dance troupe, the Bethune Ballet, while recovering from the surgeries. She said she hopes to resume her own dancing this year.
“If I can dance again, it will be the first time I’ve danced without pain.”
Bethune said her Warner Center lunch hour went by too fast.
“If Mr. Voit is interested in a talk on living beyond labels or working with pain, he can call me and I’ll come back,” she said.
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