Welcome to the Summer Intensive season. Your kids have been in their program for a few weeks, and they are no longer outliers in their social worlds. They are surrounded by like-minded dancers who are driven and love ballet. Maybe they have connected with a teacher at their SI program and your dancer is growing by leaps and bounds every week. Perhaps a week or two into the program you get the dreaded question: can they audition for the year-round program? Don’t panic and rapidly go through the mental checklist of everything you would need to do to move your kid in less than a month. Take a deep breath and stay present. Start with a few simple jumping-off questions.
- Why do you want to stay?
- What does this school have that your current school does not?
These may seem like really basic questions but once you start to pull apart the answers, you find out the why behind their desire to stay at that school. These are very individual decisions and every family must do what is right for them. Ballet is not an easy path for anyone so may we suggest that you keep an open and honest dialogue with your dancer about their path and what they want from their ballet training because it will almost certainly change as they get older.
As parents, we want to give our children every opportunity to make their dreams come true. We all feel this fear that if they reject an offer for year-round training then they are passing up their only opportunity to train at that said school. That is not so, say Co-Artistic Directors of International Ballet School, Mark Carlson and Sandra Kerr. They suggest that if your dancer continues to grow and develop as an artist and hone their mental game, the offers will continue to come when they are older and mature enough to handle all of the pressures and challenges of living away from their family. They also shared that in their school, which they have owned since 1997, on the one hand, only one of the many of their dancers who left to train elsewhere before the age of 17 continued to have a professional career. On the other, many of their students who stayed local and lived at home went on to trainee programs and were then able to dance professionally. That is a sobering statistic, though from a small sample.
Ballet requires a certain amount of hours and Kerr and Carlson do concede and it is very difficult for a dancer to make those hours up later in their training. If your dancer has topped out of the amount of training that your dancer’s school offers and your dancer feels that they are not getting the sufficient number of hours of ballet that they need to be competitive then it may be time to look for the next step in their training.
As Carlson and Kerr have pointed out, a long relationship can lead to additional support students may receive at their smaller home programs. Your home teachers potentially could offer more emotional support and less judgment when puberty hits. Big residential programs offer very little grace when puberty begins and your dancer no longer has the lanky facility of a baby gazelle. My daughter was the only girl left in her company-affiliated school’s top level from the pool of girls that she started with 5 years before. They left for a variety of reasons but several girls were cut due to body type, Cuts are a harsh reality of competitive residential programs.
Another consideration is performance opportunities. Look at how often the students perform at the school where your dancer is training for the summer and compare that with what your dancer’s current school offers. What does it look like a few years down the road? Artistry is what sets dancers apart, and the only natural way to develop it is through performing on stage.
If you have a boy, that is a different situation altogether. At some point, boys need to train with other boys. Please see our other blog post about male training or listen to the Conversations on Dance podcast where they walk through male-specific training.
A few things to consider when you are helping your dancer decide if they want to try and stay at their summer program. Compare these questions against what is offered at your dancer’s home school.
- What kind of educational support do they offer the students?
- Do they have a dedicated men’s program? If so, how many men do they have, and do the men stay in the upper levels?
- Do they offer partnering classes?
- What supplemental classes do they offer?
- What kind of support do they offer the students?
- How many kids from the lower levels are still in the program at the upper levels?
- What are their job placement stats?
We hope your dancer has a fabulous summer and gets what they want out of their SI. If your dancer falls in love with a program we gently encourage you to listen and talk through the pros and cons of why they might want to stay. Also, keep in mind that you are the parent, and it is okay to say no or revisit in a few years. Feel free to reach out to us with any questions you may have.