Our goal is to develop strong, healthy dancers with strong technical and artistic capability. We challenge dancers to develop and refine their artistic voice alongside and with their technique to help them not only understand what to do and how to do it, but also why we do it. We leverage the best of several schools of teaching in order to achieve this goal, and to give dancers familiarity and versatility so they can be confident and successful wherever they end up.
Our teachers have experience in the Vaganova, Ceccheti, & Balanchine Schools, and continuously seek out new approaches both from within established ballet schools and the broader worlds of athletics and arts.
We get to know each student individually so that we can teach new steps and deliver corrections in ways that will work for their learning style. And we prioritize anatomically correct explanations of movement alongside the more typical imagery used in ballet classes. Due to this approach, we have been able to train many professional dancers, as well as dancers who would usually be pushed out of ballet due to non-confirming body types or learning styles. We are proud to deliver all of these dancers a technical base that allows them to engage deeply with ballet throughout their lives.
In lower levels, our teaching is as stylistically neutral as possible, prioritizing a deep understanding of posture, alignment, and mobility. Classes for beginning dancers will include exercises on the floor and at the barre to develop strength and coordination. Basic barre exercises are introduced slowly and with a focus on maintaining turnout and placement.
In the middle levels, exercises increase in length, and we introduce all standard class exercises, including grand adagio and all forms of allegro. Exercises remain simple, and the focus is on developing strength and consistency through repetition. Dancers are assessed for pointe readiness, and begin pointe work when they have sufficient strength, control, and mobility. For students who have a goal of dancing professionally, we offer audition support and advising for summer intensives, and advise on boarding programs.
Students who progress to the upper levels have shown that they can maintain alignment through all basic steps and exercises. In the upper levels, we introduce all advanced pas and begin to expose dancers to stylistic choices from each of the schools.
Throughout all levels, dancers are asked to develop and refine their artistic voice. We believe that artistic expression is appropriate for all ages and should be trained alongside technique, not after it. In classes, teachers engage dancers in discussion of how various pas and port des bras are used to express story and emotion. And in addition to technique classes, we offer variations workshops for middle and upper levels with a focus on understanding character and context and delivering an emotionally rich performance. Finally, we regularly offer workshops in acting to help dancers hone their understanding of how to use physical movement to convey a story.
