At center, a chance to showcase their talent

COSTA MESA ? On Monday morning, three dozen teenagers gathered on the second floor of the Orange County Performing Arts Center and danced. It was a first for many of the participants, who came from troubled backgrounds and alternative schools.

For Taylor Wendel, it was a comeback.

Five years ago, the Costa Mesa resident broke both of her ankles when she fell into a ditch near her house. Before the accident, Taylor had belonged to a dance troupe and performed at Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, Santa Ana College and other hot spots around Orange County. When she joined her classmates at the center on Monday, though, she hadn’t danced in public in half a decade.

Next week, when the youths in “Summer at the Center” give their final performance, that dry spell may end.

“This seemed like a good opportunity to test my skills and bring back old memories,” Taylor, 16, said during her lunch break on Monday. “I love to dance.”

The students in “Summer at the Center” have dealt with all kinds of adversity in their young lives, from broken ankles to broken homes. Over the next 10 days, they’ll get a rare opportunity: to learn singing, dancing and theater at one of Southern California’s top performance venues.

The program is set to end on July 29 with three free performances in the center’s Founders Hall.

Fifteen years ago, the center initiated “Summer at the Center” to give artistic training to kids who’d had little of it. Since that time, the program has steadily grown, with more and more students applying for program.

To celebrate, the organizers have picked a special theme for this year’s show: a retrospective of the best songs and dances from the last decade and a half.

“The first year, there was maybe 10 kids, and now we have over 100 who interview,” said Bill Brawley, who has been with the program since its inception and is directing it again this summer.

The summer workshop, run by the center and the Orange County Department of Education, serves students in the county’s Alternative, Community and Correctional Education Services and Schools program, better known as ACCESS. All of the participating students attend alternative sites around the county, and they get class credit for their work at the center.

On Monday, the students began with dancing in the morning, then sat in front of a piano in the rehearsal room upstairs to try out their pipes. Roxanna Ward, a longtime accompanist for the center, pounded the keys and led the kids through a handful of classic rock numbers: “Yakety Yak,” “Jailhouse Rock” and others.

For the Coasters’ classic “Yakety Yak,” which features a dialogue between strict parents and their lazy teenagers, Ward asked the students to put a little pep into the lyrics.

After the kids sang together ? “Take out the papers and the trash/Or you don’t get no spending cash” ? the instructor had the girls bark the song’s title phrase.

Then, she told the boys to snap the next line ? “Don’t talk back” ? in their gruffest fatherly voice.

“You’re parents,” she reminded them. “You’re nagging parents.”