After Recovering from Car Accident, Dancer Catherine Round Gives Back

Six years ago, as she lay critically injured in California Hospital Medical Center, dancer Catherine Round wondered if her career had come to an end. Hours earlier, she'd been thrown into the median on the 10 Freeway when she stepped out of her car to help two young girls whose cars were in a fender bender. As she drifted in and out of consciousness, her mother and two sisters by her side, the thought that she would never be able to dance -- or even move -- again, was terrifying.

"It's the scariest thing in the world for someone who dances to think you may never do that again," she says.

Today, Round is back on her feet and has not forgotten the team of doctors and nurses who made it happen. For the third consecutive year, she will hold a dance benefit, "Love, In Its Many Forms," Saturday, September 20, 7:30 p.m. at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, Downtown Los Angeles. She hopes to raise $15,000 for the hospital, she says, that "scraped me off the freeway and saved my life."

For Round, Los Angeles had always been a place for new beginnings. Arriving in the late '90s fresh off of the stage from Ballet Omaha, she chose L.A. for the different career possibilities the city had to offer. Along with some acting, Round began performing with Aeolian Ballet, and then spent nearly eight years with Marat Daukayev School of Ballet building her name as an instructor of the Vaganova method of ballet. At the time of the accident she'd recently branched out on her own, offering instruction to students of all ages at various studios in Southern California.

Though Round had been schooled in a variety of dance techniques throughout her professional career, Vaganova, devised by the Russian dancer Agrippina Vaganova, re-engineered how she thought about ballet. "Vaganova made me a better dancer at 30 than I was in my 20s," she says. "I had no idea about coordination, or how to breathe and sit back and enjoy what I was doing. It's what made me want to teach permanently."

It was just before midnight on June 24, 2008. Round had wrapped up a technical rehearsal for a theater production she was working on with the Arc Theater Company and was heading home. Her sister, Kerry Haugland, was in the car with her. The last thing Round remembers is calling her husband to let him know she was on her way back.

Round says her sister later recounted what happened next: "We came upon a fender bender in the fast lane of the 10 Freeway. We stopped short of it by about 100 feet, and I noticed there were girls outside the cars crying. We saw the airbags had been deployed, so I thought someone might be hurt or trapped in one of the cars. I stopped my car and turned to my sister and said, 'Keep your seatbelt on and don't get out of the car.' Apparently when I got out of the car, another car hit my car full speed, then my car hit me. I flew into the median, and then the car barreled into the other two cars that were in the fender bender and totaled all four of them."

Round's sister, who was not seriously injured after the impact, crawled out the driver's side window and found her in the median. After noticing blood, Haugland took off her sweater and put it underneath Round's head. As soon as she did that, Haugland heard ambulance sirens. "They were coming," Round says. "California Hospital was right there."

Round's injuries included a concussion, and a cracked skull and sacrum. She had scabs down the sides of her face and was covered in bruises from her neck to her tailbone.

"The thing that astonished the doctors was that I didn't have extensive internal injuries," Round says. "And my husband told them, 'Well she's a dancer.' In fact my friends tease me that I likely went flying into the median like something out of Swan Lake."

After being discharged from the hospital a week later, Round began an arduous rehab regiment that consisted of daily walking, swimming, and frequent sessions at the gym in addition to regular check-ins with her doctors.

"I almost felt like a child must feel when they're learning to walk for the first time," Round says. "All that rediscovery was really interesting to me."

One month after the accident, Round began teaching classes from a walker. "I was really scared because of the head injury. I wanted my brain to start working again and not think I was going crackers," she says. "I kept telling myself, I gotta get my mind thinking again. If do that I'll feel better."

She said she began to set little goals for herself. "I'd say, OK by end of month three I'll give myself barre at home." Six months later she was able to take her first class again. In a year's time, she was back to her full teaching schedule. "I thought to myself, 'What that hospital did for me can't go unnoticed,'" she says.

Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, Round showed promise as a young dancer and eventually began to attend summer ballet intensive programs on scholarship with Ballet Tennessee and Atlanta Ballet. She briefly attended Crieghton University in Omaha but left to dance with Ballet Omaha until it shuttered in May 1996. She set her sights on Los Angeles and soon began performing with the Aeolian Ballet, a short-lived professional ballet company run by Maria Serafica. It was then she met Russian ballet master Marat Daukayev, who re-introduced her to Vaganova technique, and asked her to teach with him at his fledgling studio. "He handed me a syllabus and said, 'Do this.' And he'd sit in on my classes and say, 'You talk too much. Talk less.'"

But as it turns out, Round's gift for gab has helped define her in the morass of L.A. dance instruction. Today, with an independent teaching practice called C. Round Ballet Works, Round has 150 students from across Los Angeles -- including former professional dancers and novices alike -- with classes at Lineage Studio in Pasadena and Live Arts LA in Highland Park.

Her near-encyclopedic knowledge of Vaganova technique, and her ability to explain the why of a movement in addition to showing the how, has attracted a passionate adult dancer following who often struggle to understand, let alone, execute, the movement. Remarked one student at her recent class: "It's like she gives a master class every day."

And while her instruction is often laced with quips and stories, she can be tough, and doesn't let you give up easily. "Oh, don't tell me something's too difficult for you or I will just be relentless until we fix it," she cracks.

Round's students will have an opportunity to perform alongside professional dancers in the benefit. And for the second time since the accident, Round will be dancing. The show, directed by Round, produced by Renee Dalo with technical direction by Joe Dalo, will feature a mixed repertoire of ballet and contemporary dance with all the ticket sales going directly to the hospital. Round also set up a Fundlydrive to help raise additional funds.

"I'm thrilled to be here and to be able to give back to CA Hospital so they can help others as they have helped me," she says.

To purchase benefit tickets, please go to the Los Angeles Theatre Center's websiteor call 213-489-0994.

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