“It was not a difficult decision to make,” Alvarez said. “The opportunity opened up very suddenly. At first, I did not see myself doing professional dance, but then as everything came along, it was like ‘Oh, yeah. Well, God opened this opportunity for me so I’m going to walk through the door that he has opened.”

Alvarez expects to work on perfecting his skills for a period of years but hopes to eventually make it into the touring company.

His Minot ballet instructor of the past three years, Rinat Mouzafarov, is optimistic for him, noting Alvarez has already beat the odds in landing a training spot coveted by dancers from around the world. Mouzafarov’s confidence also is based on having seen a number of his Minot dancers achieve professional status.

He lists at least nine local students who have gone on to a larger stage. Several have danced with professional companies, including some still dancing professionally. Mouzafarovs’s reputation also has attracted dancers from professional companies who have chosen to work with him to improve their skills.

Branden Alvarez is shown at a 2022 Christmas production. (Photo by Ronald Rouse)

Alvarez, 19, credited his training at the Rinat Mouzafarov Institute of Dance & Ballet Theatre in Minot for getting him into the dance intensive program at Ballet Magnificat! this summer, which led to the invite into full-time training.

Many of Mouzafarov’s students have taken workshops or entered training programs with Ballet Magnificat!, a premier Christian ballet company led by Kathy Thibodeaux, who stepped into the classical ballet spotlight when she won a Silver Medal in international competition in 1982.

“He’s an amazing teacher,” Thibodeaux said of Mouzafarov. “We’ve actually brought him here to do a workshop here for us at Ballet Magnificat! We just love him. He’s great. He’s got a great school and we would recommend him to anybody just looking for good training.”

She said the students from Minot to Ballet Magnificat! do well because of the discipline, work ethic and love for dance that Mouzafarov instills. Those traits have helped some launch careers in the world of dance.

Jhondarr Lopez, 33, now a professional ballroom dancer from Houston, Texas, was heavily engaged in theater in high school in Minot when first exposed to ballet. He had a lead role in “Oklahoma,” which included a ballet dream sequence. Lopez said most productions cut the scene because they don’t have the ability to offer quality ballet, but Minot kept the scene because of Mouzafarov and his prima ballerina at the time, Brianna Hagar, who later went on to dance professionally and teach. The male dance role was to be performed by another dancer, who saw Lopez’s interest and suggested he take the part.

After taking in the show, Mouzafarov urged Lopez to train with him but told him he would have to come every day and dedicate himself.

“I was kind of on the fence about it, and my mother said, ‘You’re going to go do it,'” Lopez recalled. “So I did. I thought at the time that it would just kind of help me become a triple threat performer because I’ve done a lot of acting. I’ve taken some singing lessons, and that’s the direction I was going, but I hadn’t really done a lot of formal dance training. And basically, from then on, I started taking in Rinat’s ballet studio.”

He called the training “priceless.”

“It was so wonderful, and something that I looked forward to every day, because I didn’t mind the hard work. But he really pushed us. He made my body do things I didn’t know it was possible to do. He’s got some great methods and he’s very encouraging,” Lopez said.

It also created opportunities such as training at Ballet Magnificat! and traveling to Moscow.

Lopez eventually returned to acting for a time, and still does some commercials and promos for ballroom dance organizations. However, his focus is operating his Houston dance studio, teaching an average of 40 lessons a week to students of all ages.

“All of the rudimentary fundamentals that I learned in Rinat’s ballet classes just echoed and it really helped me become a great teacher and eventually a great national competitor,” he said.

He participates in 27 to 35 competitions a year, mostly in the United States but also internationally. With a new partner this past year, he is a national Rising Star Rhythm finalist, recently finishing second in the Rising Star Division of the Fred Astaire Nationals. He also is an Open Professional Rhythm semifinalist.

While at Minot State University in 2009, Lopez introduced his roommate, Kason Hanson, a music major who grew up in Newburg and Minot, to ballet. Hanson recalls telling Lopez on a Friday that he would love to learn to dance, and on Monday, he was enrolled at Mouzafarov’s studio.

“I was 21 when I started so I recognized if I am going to do anything with this I have to be incredibly smart about it and very intentional and take advantage of the incredible opportunity that Mr. Rinat gave me,” said Hanson, 35, who trained in Minot for two years.

“The opportunity of being able to train at Rinat’s opened the door to the training program at Ballet Magnificat!” he said. “That just opened up the possibility to kind of come back to dance and help out future generations of dancers who are going through that process of training and building up their bodies and having to last the rigors of a professional career.”

Hanson, who lives in the Houston area, left dance temporarily to earn a bachelor’s degree in healthcare science and become certified as a physical therapy assistant. He and his wife, Ashley, a ballet instructor and former Ballet Magnificat! company member, now operate two businesses.

Hanson started his first business, Meta Performance, to fill the gap between finishing physical therapy and returning to full performance for dancers recovering from injuries. After four years of gathering data and better understanding the underlying physical needs of dancers, he launched his second business last February called NDTS (Neurodevelopmental Training System), to educate others.

“We’re launching our first course this month, and that is Foundational Movement Concepts for Dance,” he said.

Hanson travels around the country to consult with dance studios, examining their training processes and analyzing how those processes can be optimized.

He has returned to Minot in the past as a guest performer at productions of the Institute of Dance & Ballet Theater.

The institute is holding an open house Tuesday and Wednesday from 4-6:30 p.m. Visitors can watch students in training and obtain information about the program and enrollment. Mouzafarov’s dancers will be performing in the Western Plains Opera Company’s production of “Carmen” Sept. 8-9 and at Norsk Hostfest Sept. 27-30.