High Tech Meets Home on the Range

By David Favrot

Traditional dance training, a family atmosphere, and computer wizardry on a California ranch  

There’s not much, from the looks of things, to tell you that a 20-acre horse ranch near Sacramento in Northern California may be spawning a big step forward in dance stage production. Baseline Road in Placer County is flat, pre-tornado Wizard of Oz territory: golden-brown fields, barbed-wire fences, hand-painted signs touting “Fresh Strawbaries [sic] 4 Sale,” and the blue outline of the Sierra Nevada far off to the east. But there are clues in addition to the easy-to-miss sign for the ranch that’s home to Dance Gallery 2. Check out the license plates in the driveway: “THE DG2” on the red Chevy Trail Blazer, and on the black Ford pickup, “EFX CTRL,” as in “effects control.” That’s Doug McLemore’s specialty. Dance Gallery 2 is run by its founder, Doug’s wife, Lucy, while Doug handles the technical end of its staged performances.

The school gets a lot of use out of its single 35-foot-by-25-foot suspended- wood studio floor—“I’m old-school,” Lucy says of the floor. Last year it took a pounding from about 580 students from age 3 to adult, she says, taking ballet, tap, jazz, break-dancing, and hip-hop under a staff of 5 choreographers, 6 paid teachers, 21 student teachers, and 12 junior student teachers. One of her former students, 21-year-old Dominic Sandoval, has his own break dancing crew and was one of eight finalists on Fox television’s So You Think You Can Dance in the 2007 season. This fall he is touring the country with the stage show based on the series. Lucy admits she still cringes when she sees him spinning on his head or shoulders, with a concern that’s both professional and motherly: Dominic, she says, sometimes stays in a room downstairs from the studio, where he studied jazz, tap, and ballet and also taught for three years.

While Dominic obviously can hold his own with top-level talent, Dance Gallery 2 doesn’t enter into competitions with other schools or encourage rivalry among its own students. They get trophies and plaques—even a dozen roses for students with 15 years’ attendance—but not for besting other students. “Once you enter through our studio door, everybody is a star,” Lucy says.

That policy stems from her experience with her son, Brandon, now a 21-year-old college student. When Brandon, who is autistic, was a boy, “I opened the ranch so I could be home with him,” Lucy explains. “He had an incredible passion for dance. He never missed a rehearsal.” But he was so focused on his own performance that his sense of ensemble was undependable: “If the other kids in class all turned to the right and he turned to the left, he was right and they were wrong.” She ended up expanding her nonjudgmental classroom treatment of Brandon to her other students, with the mantra “It’s OK to make a mistake. You just try it differently the next time.” Her students’ parents don’t seem to have a problem with the policy, she says.

Instead of competitions, Dance Gallery 2 gives students two yearly opportunities to perform: a recital in December and a staged production in June. The shows are where Doug McLemore snags a starring role, though when the lights go down, he’s in the back of the auditorium with his laptop. In his non-dance hours, Doug works part-time doing information technology support for a California state agency, drawing on more than three decades of computer expertise.

The path to that expertise was no straight line. It began with stints in a succession of Sacramento-area junior colleges, followed by two years in the military. Doug flew Chinook cargo helicopters in Vietnam during the war years of 1970 and 1971. On one mission his copter, almost entirely without armor, came under fire as he delivered a load of water to fight a fire on a U.S. base south of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) that had come under Vietcong mortar attack. That day of combat earned Doug the Bronze Star, the fourth-highest combat award for bravery awarded by the U.S. military.

His postwar years found him working in his father’s air-filter manufacturing plant in Roseville, north of Sacramento, where Doug got fed up with the factory’s sluggish output. So he automated the factory—robotics was “something I just picked up” as he worked, he says. When he had finished, a plant that used to take 10 to 15 minutes to cut 12 filter frames could produce a frame in about 15 seconds.

So when Doug met Lucy through one of his grade-school buddies in 1993, he recalls, she saw a man with technical expertise. “She asked me what she asked everybody: ‘Can you help me with my show?’ ” He ended up calling the cues for her dance school’s stage production. He’d never done it before; his biggest previous show-biz experience was playing drums in a local rock group called The Average Garage Band. That first dance-school show was decidedly low-tech. “We had a guy out in the audience with a cassette player and a headset” supplying the music, Doug says. But he liked his role and got good at it.

These days, Doug also shoots live video of the performances and builds the sets on the ranch in a big metal shed, home during the off-season to a fog machine, sets and props from previous shows (including, on a recent visit, a fake upright piano in blond wood with painted keys), and the occasional black widow spider.

“Spiders” of a different kind are a big part of Doug’s contribution to stage technique. These wireless, remote-control gizmos are his response to the growing complexity of school dance productions. Audiences may be there mostly to watch little Suzie’s three minutes in the spotlight, but they’ve also seen Beyonce’s videos and Justin Timberlake’s shows and Cirque du Soleil, so the challenge of staging a jaw-dropping show without a Vegas showroom budget—so that “when Grandma and Grandpa come, Grandpa won’t be grumpy and complaining,” as Doug puts it—grows and grows. That means ever-more-elaborate sets (and more of them), with costumes, lighting, and stage effects to match. And that, in turn, means hundreds more cues on split-second timing for the backstage crew, with the accompanying risk of mishaps.

Not that you would have noticed these challenges in Dance Gallery 2’s most recent show, The Headlines. It’s drenched in film-noir atmosphere, reminiscent of Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal video, and set to an eclectic score that zooms from Rhapsody in Blue to “Ain’t No Other Man.” A five-minute opening video— shot in color in abandoned offices in Sacramento and then converted to black-and-white for that doom-laden 1940s look—sets the scene: A gangster’s moll is phoning a tip to a reporter and setting up her two-timing lover for arrest at a nightclub. The video ends, and on the dimly lit stage we see dancers huddled for warmth around a barrel that bursts into flames . . . and it’s dance time, with principal choreography by Nick Willrich assisted by, among others, Dominic Sandoval and Lucy’s daughter, 23- year-old Summer Cedarleaf.

Long after the show, in his gadget-crammed den downstairs from the dance studio, Doug sits at his laptop with a CD player, a tape deck, and other audio gear in a 3-foot-high stack at his elbow and puts the onstage barrel through its paces. His stage cue system runs on software that combines the features of an audio mixing board and a multi-track recording and editing setup, so he can control the recorded stage music as well. His laptop screen displays a series of horizontal lines, each one tracking a dance, lighting, or stage-effect cue (indicated by a small, vertical hash-mark). As the program runs, the lines track steadily from right to left and Doug can broadcast his cues to the backstage crew, wearing wireless headsets, or to stage monitors.

Doug’s innovation is this: Some stage effects, including the barrel, are fully automated, though that feature can be overridden in an emergency. Fastened under the barrel is a battery-powered radio receiver that’s connected to an air compressor. When its programmed cue comes up, the receiver gets an automated radio command and activates the compressor. As it blows air up through the open top of the barrel, a cluster of suspended fabric strips flutters in the breeze while a simultaneous lighting cue bathes the strips in a red glow, and you have a “burning” barrel.

Doug calls his radio receivers “spiders” because they have eight outputs, just as spiders have eight legs, to operate up to eight stage devices simultaneously. The automated cueing system, Doug says, can control up to 2,048 such devices, which run on batteries or household current. Its radio signal has a half-mile range. Radio interference—from, say, someone punching a garage-door opener down the street—isn’t a problem because commands are transmitted in computer code. With a 45-minute show involving up to 500 stage cues, the spiders let him concentrate on the tricky parts and give him what he calls “ ‘dream freedom.’ We can make this look like a professional show.”

All this doesn’t come cheap. The software comes in three versions that range in price from $300 to $2,500. Though Doug works with the equivalent of the top-of-the line model, he says he could call a show with the cheapest version in a pinch. In addition, he figures the spiders and control modules cost between $1,500 and $2,000, with another $10,000 for computer gear. As for putting it all together, he’s thinking about ways he can market his system or be a consultant for dance studios that want to duplicate it. In any case, his setup is definitely a “Kids, don’t try this at home” project unless you happen to be a software engineer.

Or, unless you’re married to one. Lucy McLemore got an early start in the business end of dance: She opened her first studio at age 14, teaching neighborhood children in her hometown of White Bear Lake, MN (north of Minneapolis). Lucy, the child of a Japanese mother and French father, caught stage fever at age 10 as one of the students in a production of The King and I. She opened a second studio at 18 and a third when she was 21.

Her dance training began at age 4 at the Larkin School of Dance in Maplewood, MN, and the Andahazy Russian dance school in Minneapolis. Her subsequent tutors included Gus Giordano and Frank Hatchett. If you were watching TV’s disco-dancing contest show Dance Fever back in 1979, you’ve seen Lucy—she and her partner were first-place finishers that year. In addition to a wardrobe—and let’s throw a veil of charity over the tight-pants-and-polyester fashions of the day—they won an eight-track tape machine rigged up with lights that blinked in time to the music.

After a stint as a dance instructor and entertainer with Princess Cruise Lines (then called Sitmar Cruise Lines) in the early 1980s, Lucy worked as a choreographer and teacher before opening Dance Gallery 2 in 1991. In addition, she has worked with Showcase Productions in preparing parades, performances, and workshops at Disneyland and Walt Disney World with her husband as the official videographer.

In keeping with what Lucy calls the “family feeling” she seeks in dance education, her studio’s adjoining lounge is equipped with sofas, a television, a pool table, and a dartboard for the comfort of parents waiting while their children take class—in farm country, it’s a long drive to the nearest Starbucks. Parents sometimes bring picnics and hang out all day, Lucy says. But she also puts them to work: The moll, mobster, reporter, and other players in the short video that opens The Headlines were all volunteer non-actors. At the end of the workday, Doug typically leaves his high-tech hideaway, comes upstairs, and cooks dinner for the teaching staff. Now that’s family.       

Photo captions (from top to bottom):

If it weren’t for the sign, you’d never guess there would be a dance school in this open ranchland.

Computerized lighting and haze add to the theatricality of the Dance Gallery 2 production Just Your Imagination.

Doug holds a wireless “spider,” which triggers the effects for the “burning” barrel in the foreground.

Just Your Imagination featured computerized lighting, four flying/spinning dancers, and rotating platforms (controlled by Doug’s “spider”).

 Doug films the opening scene of The Headlines, a 6-minute movie written and directed by Miss Lucy, which introduced the Dance Gallery 2 stage show of the same name.

 DG2 dancers prerecord the sound of their taps, which will be dubbed onto the production music.  

Doug and Lucy McLemore enjoy a moment of post-performance glory.  

All photos courtesy Dance Gallery 2

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