Ever wondered what the path to becoming a professional ballet dancer is? We wondered that too when our kids were younger. It never occurred to us what a long and winding road it often is. Not to mention, it’s not the same for everyone. But, there is a pretty general path that most dancers follow.
In this series, we’ll tackle the three primary milestones associated with becoming a professional dancer. In our first installment we’ll discuss how to tell if your dancer’s potential will take them beyond their local studio and if so, how to figure out when it’s time to do so.
Part two will cover full-time ballet programs with an emphasis on residential conservatories and company affiliated schools. We’ll cover the changes to expect at residential programs as well as how to evaluate which program might be right for your dancer.
Finally, part three will provide an overview of what it means to be a trainee or in a second company. Different schools and companies have different numbers of post-graduate levels that dancers must pass through before becoming a full company member. We’ll try to demystify these levels a bit.
Your Local Studio
Unless you live within close proximity to a large, company affiliated school that has a children’s program, your dancer will likely start at a local ballet studio. Students typically stay at their local studio until they are in their early to mid teens. At that point, more training is often needed and they leave for a company affiliated program (San Francisco Ballet School, Atlanta Ballet, Joffrey Academy, etc). or an unaffiliated conservatory e.g. Ellison or Harid.
In this post, we’ll talk about not only how to evaluate a local ballet program but also the questions to be asking at this stage of the game in order to gauge potential for a professional ballet career. Note, it is extremely hard to predict future success when a student is 13 or 14. We discussed how to choose a school in depth in our video last week, but here we’ll cover the key points.
An important thing to remember is that most dancers at local ballet studios are doing it recreationally. It’s akin to a club soccer team or doing the middle school play. You may find some dancers who want to pursue ballet as a career, but you will likely find just as many who don’t want that. The key is to find a local studio that has enough kids who may also share your dancer’s ambition.
If your dancer wants a career, consider whether or not your current studio has the tools to get them to that next level. When thinking about the right fit for a local studio, be sure to ask this: what are the credentials of the teachers? Did they have professional careers? Or were they college dance majors? And, how long have they been teaching? People will always say that it doesn’t matter if the teacher had a professional career. This is true. But, if they didn’t, do they have good teaching credentials?
For example, are they RAD or ABT National Curriculum certified? RAD stands for Royal Academy of Dance and is a dance education board based out of the UK. ABT ‘s National Curriculum is the curriculum developed by American Ballet Theater and it is used widely by studios across the U.S. That gives them a bit more depth of knowledge and a deep base of age appropriate curriculum. Typically, if teachers do have those kinds of certifications, it will be in their bios on the school’s website.
Teachers who have had careers know what’s required to get your student to that next level and that can be invaluable to both your student as well as parents who are unfamiliar with how the ballet world works. Ummm, that’s most of us!
One other way to gauge how effective a studio is is to look at where their students get into summer programs. Are they top tier? Middle or lower tier?
In addition, look at whether or not the school has a history of producing students that go off the well-regarded professional training programs. When kids leave that local studio, where are they going? Are they headed to well-known company affiliated programs or conservatories? Or, are they headed to programs out of the country, particularly in Canada or Europe? If there is a steady stream of kids that head off to these programs, that’s a good sign. What you want to look for is consistency. If one kid went somewhere one year, that doesn’t tell you much. But, if the school sends a few dancers off each year, that’s a pretty good sign.
One note – It is much easier to get into a summer intensive than it is to a year-round professional training program at that same school. So it’s best to look at the track record of getting kids into summer programs and also to year-round programs.
Of course we know that this can be dependent on the talent pool in an available area. But, if the studio shows that they can consistently train good dancers, year after year, that may be a place you want to be.
Also, it is important that your studio offers partnering by the time your dancer is about 12. Students coming into the advanced and even the intermediate levels of company affiliated schools are expected to have at least basic partnering skills.
Finally, if they compete at the larger ballet competitions are they having success? This doesn’t necessity mean placing, but passing through to the final round, getting offers to attend summer programs or short stay auditions for year-round placement
Understanding your Dancer’s Potential and Where They Fit
At this stage of the game you also need to gauge where your dancer fits in all of this. There are four primary ways to do this and they’re similar to how you would evaluate a studio overall.
First, what do your home school’s teachers say about your student’s potential for a career? As we’ve mentioned in previous posts, teachers have the best interest of their students at heart. And, usually, you will get pretty honest answers from them in terms of your dancer’s potential. But, remember, that just because your dancer is fantastic at age 13, doesn’t portend that they will have a career in their future. You’ll want to be using these same metrics every year along the way.
The second metric to look at is casting. Is your dancer getting good casting in the shows your studio does? If they are consistently being featured, while not always a clear indicator of professional potential, it’s a good sign of where they fit in the class rank of that studio. That, coupled with the other areas we’ve discussed will give you some trend lines to work with.
Third, are they getting into strong summer programs? And, once there, how do they stack up against other dancers?
When your dancer arrives at their summer intensive, it becomes clear pretty quickly how each student ranks in the class. You’ll hear some parents say “oh, my kid doesn’t look around and stack rank themselves. Well, honestly, they should. Dancers need to have a keen eye on how they fit in at every step along the way.
One caution: those initial summer programs that dancers attend at age 13 or 14 can often be a big wake-up call for kids coming from their local studios. They may have been at the top of their class during the school year, but find that the talent at a summer program can be well beyond what they see during the school year. This is another great way to gauge where your dancer fits.
When Sam went to the Houston Ballet summer intensive when he was 13, he went from being at the top of his class to being surrounded by boys from all over the world who were really, really talented! It opened his eyes to the fact that there are great dancers everywhere and it was probably time for him to look further afield for training that involved more boys.
Sam’s studio met all of the criteria we discussed above, but it didn’t have a lot of boys. At the same time we knew it was time for Sam to move on, his home studio also recognized this. It was his teachers who told him at the end of the summer that it was time to go. So, off he went to train with a class full of boys his age.
Also, if you find that your dancer is the top of the heap at their local studio and there aren’t many other dancers pushing them, it may be time to look around.
One pro-tip about summer programs: summer programs often audition students to attend their year-round program. So, if your dancer is interested in attending a particular year-round program, they might want to consider attending the summer there prior to the year they want to join. And, if your dancer gets admitted, be prepared for a whirlwind of a move at the end of the summer. We’ll talk about how to handle late summer admission to year-round schools in a future post.
Finally, if your studio does compete, how does your dancer fare at competitions? As we discussed before, it’s less about winning and more about getting a good sense of the talent. When your dancer is in a master class being offered by the competition, are they finding that they are as talented as others in the room? Are they getting any attention from the teachers? Even better, are they getting attention from company affiliated schools in the form of summer or year-round admission? As an aside, if you’re wondering if competing makes sense, we have a blog post that talks about it in more detail.
None of these metrics guarantee that your dancer will have a career. In fact, there are a lot of dancers out there who will meet every criteria we listed and still not make it. But, at this stage of the game the goal is to see if your dancer’s feet are pointed in the right direction and these metrics are the best way to determine that at a younger age.
In our next installment of The Path to Professional, we’ll discuss the switch from after-school training to full-time ballet training. Stay tuned!