Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Ellie DeArmond combines aerobics with classical ballet in the aeroballet classes she teaches for the Los Gatos-Saratoga Department of Community Education and Recreation.

Aeroballet combines disciplines

By Shari Kaplan

Twice in her life--at her birth and the birth of her son--events beyond her control handed Ellie DeArmond the proverbial lemons, yet she turned them around both times and made lemonade.

A Los Gatos dancer, artist and writer who earlier this year pioneered a workout system she calls "aeroballet," DeArmond says she began life as a very unlikely dancer. Born with both of her feet turned backwards, she had to wear braces for her first five years. Afterwards, she became pigeon-toed and found it difficult to walk without tripping or knocking knees.

DeArmond's mother enrolled her in ballet and tap dance classes in the hopes of correcting the problem. It worked.

She soon dropped the tap classes but stuck with ballet, in which she has now trained for more than 30 years. This included intensive study at the San Jose Ballet School under Dmitri and Francesca Romanoff, whom DeArmond names among the experts in the regimented Russian style of ballet.

"I'd always put myself behind the most advanced woman in the class and I'd try to emulate her," DeArmond recalls.

Although she overcame her childhood disability, DeArmond still cannot achieve the perfect turnout and form the way a handful of the world's peerless ballerinas have.

As a dancer, DeArmond says she is always pushing harder to get a better angle or move. She feels this attitude helped her improve and grow. In the 1970s, her repertoire grew to include appearances at various dance clubs and shows, in which she was often paid by bands to get the crowd going. This "rock ballet," as she calls it, was similar to what she soon saw dancers doing on the TV show Solid Gold.

In tip-top shape prior to her pregnancy of several years ago, DeArmond found herself under doctors' orders to spend nearly the whole nine months in bed. After having son Adam, DeArmond found she had gained 60 pounds and lost her figure. Aerobics classes proved a propitious remedy.

"In the first aerobics class I took, the instructor came up to me and said, 'You have great form. Did you used to be dancer?' " she recalls.

Although she lost weight and gained energy, DeArmond didn't like the soreness that aerobic workouts sometimes caused. She also yearned to see aerobics moves that were "more reflective of grace, beauty and elegance," as seen in ballet.

"I altered every move into some sort of ballet move or stretch," she says.

While improvising like this with her fellow aerobic exercisers, DeArmond met two women connected with the San Jose Cleveland Ballet who complimented her and suggested she share her innovative techniques with others as an instructor.

Although she said she wasn't interested, the women talked to her twice more over the following few months, finally offering her admittance to a sold-out Swan Lake performance. Something clicked shortly after this, she says, and she began rigorous training, inventing new moves and incorporating hand weights into the workout. She now calls the women her "guardian angels."

It was DeArmond's friend, KFOX-FM disc jockey and rock musician Greg Kihn, who coined the term "Aeroballet." After that, establishing her own workout classes was just a phone call
and interview away. The Los Gatos-Saratoga Department of Community Education & Recreation liked the idea and soon DeArmond was teaching others how to combine the fat-burning, muscle-toning power of aerobics with the lithesome grace of ballet.

DeArmond teaches Aeroballet on Sundays from 5 to 6 p.m. in Room B of the Los Gatos-Saratoga Community Education and Recreation Center on E. Main Street. For more information, call DeArmond at 787-2206 or the Recreation Department at 354-8700, ext. 21 or 25.