Nine-year-old Nathan Rowell and his classmates attend the Oregon Ballet Academy last month in Eugene. The boys' class at the studio regularly has 30 students, with sometimes as many as 40.

EUGENE — The Oregon Ballet Academy has the usual throng of girls in ballet flats and leotards practicing their pirouettes and assuming their attitudes, which in ballet doesn’t mean being impudent but standing on one leg with the other lifted at a 90-degree angle.

But the academy also has something different than most: It has a bunch of boys just as dedicated to turnout, battement and jete as their female counterparts. The main difference is that the studio offers a weekly class just for boys, and it’s free.

In the two years since they began their boys-only program, husband-and-wife OBA owners John Grensback and Megan Murphy have seen their male enrollment grow from a handful to several dozen, ranging in age from 9 years to college age.

“We really wanted to do a program for boys, but we knew it would be hard to get them to come because ballet isn’t something most boys think about doing,” Murphy said. “But we were able to get some grants, and John does the teaching. It’s great to see what these boys have accomplished.”

Boys who want more than one class a week enroll in coed classes, and the sexes also mix during rehearsals, performances and special academy-wide social events.

The boys’ class regularly has upward of 30 students enrolled, and sometimes it swells to at least 40. “It’s their own class, different from the girls’ classes,” Murphy said. “They do pushups, leaps, turns, big jumps — and they love it.”

Not only that, but some of the students, including Mayim Stiller, have excelled to the point that they can set their sights on a professional career.

“I’ve loved dance ever since I was a really little kid,” said Stiller, who turns 16 in December. “I did salsa dancing and hip-hop lessons first, and that was fun, but it was the year after I started ballet that I started thinking of dance as a career. I absolutely love all kinds of dance, but I really see ballet as my future.”

He started dancing with Grensback at OBA four years ago, back when there might be at most two or three boys in a class. Now, he hopes that in a year — two at the most — he will be dancing in an apprenticeship program with a major dance company.

“I work pretty hard,” Stiller said. “Dancing as much as I do now is like having a part-time job. My social life is mostly my ballet friends, and then I have school. That’s what I do.”

Grensback’s teaching “is really excellent,” he said. “He challenges you to go as far as you can and then a little further. Even if you can’t do something completely at first, eventually you get to the point where you can do it. It’s one of his strengths.”

But ballet, Grensback-style, is not for sissies. “You have to be really strong — you have to learn how to hold your arms, jump high and hold your leg out straight, and that takes a lot of strength,” Stiller said.

“It’s not simple to lift a girl above your head, and we have to be able to do that. I do at least 200 pushups a day.”