As we roll into the holidays, better known as Nutcracker and summer intensive audition season, we wanted to give you a bit of advice on how to handle the inevitable acceptance, rejection and scholarship issues that will arise after auditions conclude.

Ballet summer intensive auditions are some of the most stressful times in a young dancer’s life. Your student may be at the top of the class in their home school. But, they arrive at an audition and find that the room is full of dancers who are at the top of their class at their school. Not to mention, they have 90 minutes, on one given day, to show the adjudicator what they’re made of. 

I’ve seen countless kids walk out of an audition only to collapse in their parent’s arms sobbing about how horribly they did (hint: it’s usually not nearly as bad as your dancer thinks it was.). But, auditions can also be fantastic! It’s not uncommon for a dancer to find that one teacher or that one audition class where everything just clicks. And, when it does happen, drink it up – it will boost your dancer’s confidence more than you can imagine. 

Ok, so auditions are over. Now what? Let the notifications roll……..

Rejections

They happen. Your instinct might be to talk to your dancer about why they didn’t get in. Stuff that impulse way down deep and don’t do it. Just don’t. Rejections happen. They happen to everyone. Talk to every principal dancer out there and I guarantee you that when they were 12, they didn’t get in somewhere they really, really wanted to go. 

My 18 year-old son, who is happily part of the second company of Houston Ballet, desperately wanted to go to SAB when he was 12. Unfortunately, SAB did not desperately want him. It crushed him. When he got the rejection letter I didn’t know what to say to him. Up until then, he had been fairly successful in dance and it had been a pretty easy ride. Since no one ever tells you why your kid does or doesn’t get accepted to something, there is little you can do. We told him to shake it off and that there would be plenty more auditions in the future. Of course, we felt horrible for him. And, being completely irrational parents, we wondered if this signaled the demise of his potential ballet career. But, we kept our months shut and left it at that.

The bottom line? Kids get rejected. There is not much you can do about it except be supportive. Monday morning quarterbacking does nothing except make them feel worse than they already do. Let it go – the odds are good that your dancer is getting into other programs despite the letdown of not being admitted to others. 

This is also an excellent time to teach your dancer about disappointment. Life isn’t always fair and If they go after a professional ballet career, rejection is part of the game. They may not get into a summer program when they’re 12, but learning how to deal with that will help them when they don’t get that trainee spot they were shooting for or if casting doesn’t go their way. Learning to deal with curve balls at an early age is an important skill all dancers need to develop, not only for ballet, but for life.

Acceptances

Yay! Your dancer got into their dream program! Or, maybe it was their second or even fourth choice. Regardless, yay! The two hardest parts in all this are managing the timelines for replying and ultimately deciding where to go.

Hopefully, you read our blog post about researching summer programs and scheduling strategies and grouped your auditions into a few weekends. That way, all notifications should be coming in right around the same time. 

Now comes the fun part – figuring out where to go! While we won’t tell you how to do it, we do recommend that for any programs you plan to decline, be sure to notify them as soon as possible. Most summer intensives maintain waitlists. The sooner a school knows how many people will be attending, the sooner that school can start admitting waitlisted students. If you’ve ever had a kid get waitlisted, I’m sure you can understand why we tell people to reply to programs quickly!

Many schools will have a portal where your dancer simply indicates whether or not they plan to attend. However, if your dancer received any sort of scholarship, we recommend sending a personal note to the school. This email should come from the dancer, not the parent. As your dancer continues with ballet training, they will be asked to take on more and more independence and responsibility. It’s never too early to teach them how to take the lead on communicating with a school. If your dancer is old enough and mature enough to go away to a summer program, they are certainly old enough to send an email to a ballet school.

Let’s talk blacklists. The short answer is that they don’t exist, It’s a myth. Turning a school down one summer will not keep your dancer from being admitted in the future. Both my son and Jenny’s daughter turned schools down and then were admitted in subsequent years. It even happened with my son and SAB, which seems to be the one that most parents seem to think keeps a blacklist. In fact, we have asked several adjudicators about this, including two we spoke with in recent podcast episodes, and they’ve all told us that this simply isn’t the case. 

Timing

If your dancer has scheduled auditions across multiple months, they may find themselves in a situation where one program’s deadline is looming but your dancer has yet to hear from a more recent audition. This is the main reason we tell everyone to group auditions as close to one another as possible.

If this situation arises, some summer programs will offer short extensions beyond the required deadline. However, there is never a guarantee of this. So, be sure to consider how long schools take to notify and then how long a dancer has before a decision must be made. 

Many dancers audition for ballet summer intensives in the U.S. while also submitting auditions for programs in Europe. Unfortunately, most European intensives notify far later than those from the U.S. In fact, deadlines to accept and place deposits on U.S. programs have come and gone before anything shows up from Europe! So, what to do?

There really isn’t much you can do other than plan for it. You may have to factor in losing a deposit to your financial planning. This is why you’ll see many teen dancers who will stack a U.S. program with a later short European program. Or, dancers will stack multiple European programs and stitch together two or three short intensives together to create one summer of European ballet. That way, losing deposits becomes less of an issue. 

Scholarships

Merit scholarships are typically offered by most programs that run summer intensives and are  used to attract top talent. Does everyone get them? No. Do boys get more than girls? Yes. And, until it becomes more socially acceptable for boys to do ballet, this probably won’t change. Not to mention that if your female dancer wants partnering classes, the school needs to attract a critical mass of boys. For many schools, this means using scholarships to attract them.

Scholarships can come in many forms but they’re usually offered to cover partial or full tuition, partial or full housing and sometimes even travel costs. If your dancer is offered a scholarship, congratulations! It will help defray costs on what can turn into a really expensive summer. 

The good news about scholarships is that it’s a clear indicator that the school is interested in your student, certainly to have them attend for the summer, and maybe also for the school year. I want to be clear on this, though. Although summer intensives in the U.S. are used to recruit year-round students, they exist primarily to bring in much needed revenue to schools. It is far easier to get into a highly competitive summer program than it is to get admitted to that school’s year-round program. 

Take San Francisco Ballet School as an example. Each level in an SFBS summer intensive may have 20-25 dancers in a class. However, during the school year, that level may have 15 students. That means there are far fewer available slots in a year-round class than there are for the summer. This is where scholarships can be one gauge of a school’s interest. A 25% tuition scholarship sends the message that the school may have some interest, but it isn’t a slam dunk. A full tuition and full housing scholarship? That’s a much clearer indicator that a school might be interested in your dancer for a year-round spot. Is this always the case? Not necessarily, but it is likely.

We’ve been asked about whether or not it’s appropriate to negotiate on scholarships. Say that one school offered our dancer a 50% tuition and no housing but another school offered full tuition and no housing. Is it ok to call the school that offered half-tuition and play them off of the school that offered full-tuition? 

Although it’s not typically done, and we’re hesitant to even recommend it, if the additional dollars would make the difference between your dancer being able to attend or not, it doesn’t hurt to ask about additional financial support. But, if you do decide to do this, make sure your dancer is prepared to attend that program. Don’t negotiate just to see what happens and our advice is to only do this if you really, really need it.

In addition, most schools offer need-based financial aid. This is another way to offset the costs of a program and we know several dancers who have applied for and received generous financial aid packages.

Kids Talk

Let’s be totally honest about this. Some kids will talk about where they get in, where they didn’t and whether they got a scholarship. And, some won’t ever say a word. In our experience, the girls tend to play things pretty close to their vest, even when it comes to admissions and rejections. The boys? I didn’t see a lot of them offering up information unsolicited, but they did tend to talk about it more. 

How your student handles this is really personal. The advice we always gave my son was that if he was asked a question, he should answer it as he saw fit. Of course this was always easier when he was having successful audition seasons! When his fellow students asked him about his SAB audition when he was 12, that conversation was much, much harder!

And, parents, think about how you want to handle this as well. These conversations will happen amongst parents while you’re in the lobby or waiting outside the school to pick your dancer up.

The bottom line is that kids (and parents) are going to talk. It’s important to prepare your dancer for how they want to be part of that conversation. 

There will be the inevitable hurt feelings over one dancer getting into a program and others not making the cut. It’s important to remember that this is all transient. By March or April, everyone has forgotten who got in where and they’ve moved on to worrying about more important things like the spring show and evaluations!

Ok, so with Nutcracker in full swing and summer intensive auditions starting in just a few short weeks, we want to send the best vibes to all your students and also to all you parents – you’ve got this!!!

**Be sure to check out all our other SI resources on our Summer Intensive Boot Camp page!