A Dance Doctor Who
Will Make House Calls
By BETH ANN KRIER, Times Staff Writer
Is your jitterbug looking a bit anemic lately? Do the dips in your waltz have no vital signs? Whatever the dance floor ailment, increasing numbers of Southern Californians have discovered a new remedy: the "Dance Doctor." He's the old-fashioned type. He makes house calls.
A Step Healer
While many of John Cassese's patients enlist his services chiefly as a pleasurable substitute for aerobic exercise ("This is a lot more fun than working out in a room full of sweaty people", insists four-times-a-week client Kathleen Beck), most people hire the Dance Doctor to heal their steps. Clients include couples, like Bruce and Karen Horowitz, who called Cassese so they'd look spectacular dancing together at their wedding, and philanthropist Anna Bing Arnold, who sought him out so she could learn to follow any dance partner.
There are businessmen, like Pacific Palisades real estate developer Glenn Berk, who never learned to dance and was put off by the prospect of learning publicly in a class full of strangers. So he arranged a weekly class for himself and his 12-year-old daughter-only to have it regularly crashed by his wife and the children's nanny.
Even professional dancers have been known to summon the Dance Doctor. Carol Lawrence, for instance, enlisted Cassese to help her prepare for an exercise video featuring Broadway show tunes and then gave him a role in the video.
And Miriam Aaron, a former ballerina and exhibition ballroom dancer, hired the Dance Doctor when a physical therapist and masseuse weren't helping her to recover after a long illness.
"I can walk alone now without being supported," she said after about a year of sessions with Cassese. "It's given me a lift in my life to be able to tango, rumba, samba and fox trot again. It's restored some of my self-esteem."
In addition, the Dance Doctor, a firm believer in the regenerative powers of dance, treats larger groups in weekly dance classes at the Pritikin Longevity Center.
A New Yorker of Italian descent who grew up winning every dance contest in sight, Cassese's story is not unlike that of Tony Manero's in the movie "Saturday Night Fever."
14-Hour Days
Instead of heading for Broadway after high school, Cassese first enrolled in college. After a year as an accounting major, however, he went back to dancing, becoming a teacher-trainee at a Studio in White Plains, N.Y. Frequently spending 14 hours a day at the center, staying until 2 or 3 a.m. to study films on teaching technique, Cassese completed the course in one year as opposed to the typical three. And he swiftly was awarded a slot teaching in the Studio on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. Within another year he was managing the place and personally introducing Kathryn Murray to disco.
But during these "pre-med" years, Cassese enrolled in Turtle Bay Music School, formed a rock band (Pegasus), owned his own nightclub for a while, appeared in off-Broadway shows, did television commercials and performed as both a singer and dancer at such New York spots as the Tavern on the Green and Trude Heller's.
Cassese initially moved to Los Angeles in 1972 to pursue a recording career, but when that didn't take off as fast as he would have liked, he shifted into the field of his then girlfriend: real estate.
Not Happy in Real Estate
"I was making good money buying, refurbishing and selling houses but I wasn't happy," he recalls over lunch at his favorite restaurant, a Melrose district spot serving gourmet macrobiotic fare. "I had a wonderful house in Malibu and one in the Hollywood Hills but it didn't fill me up. I was very unhappy. I decided I had to make some changes, so I got back into my dancing and singing. If I had stayed with the real estate I probably could have been retired today. But that's not what makes me happy."
But as he began increasingly writing, recording and performing his own music, Cassese decided to go to work for himself as a private dance teacher. Now based in Los Angeles, he came up with the title "Dance Doctor" (DANCE DR is also the license plate on his convertible) and had no trouble at all attracting clients...
If there is anything that marks all of Cassese's house calls it is a consistent sense of joy and fun for both the teacher and the students as they lose themselves in dance.
He is known for both gentleness and humor ("Not that right foot, your other right foot"). And the doctor's floorside manner is nothing if not encouraging, whether he's attending Anna Bing Arnold's fox trot or Gail Berk's swing.
"He's patient, friendly and not fresh at all," Arnold attests. "He's good goods."
"I can't praise him too highly," says Berk. "He's terrific."
Oh, there are occasional problems, the doctor admits, but nothing terminal. Asked if clients have been known to develop crushes on him and request prescriptions he'd rather not fill, Cassese says that has indeed occurred-but that such situations have been handled with a polite but firm insistence that he does net mix business with pleasure.
And there are also occupational hazards such as stereo volume antagonizing neighbors, not to mention Cassese's enthusiasm for yelling "MOVE IT!!?' even louder than the music.
But in general, Cassese claims, his practice is largely symptom - free. If there are any minor frustrations lurking in the good doctor, they appear to have more to do with his ambitions than his accomplishments. He's still working on his recording career and, as you might expect, he'd eventually like to run a chain of Dance Doctor studios or star in a Dance Doctor TV series. Preferably both.
"A big part of my service is to be sure that we have fun. It's an important part of people's instruction," Cassese says. "Basically, what dancing does for everyone is make life more enjoyable. It makes it a title lighter."
