Birdy

I’m not sure where in Southern California you would be located. There are a couple of good Vaganova style studios in Orange County, and one that I know of in Los Angeles. There aren’t any Balanchine specific schools in Orange County, but there is a really good one in Los Angeles. If you are considering having her train in the US, I agree that the Ballet Talk for Dancers site is a great resource. You can search for Pre-Professional schools by location.

Yes, a five week summer program is usually around $3000, then if you need housing it’s another $3000. And most kids still have 7-8 other weeks with no dance scheduled, so things can get crazy really quickly. We usually try doing a shorter program and pick up other local, drop-in classes for the rest of the summer. I definitely feel that the system in the US leads to a lot of disappointment. Perhaps because there are so many training options, there is always someone willing to take a student, so I think many dancers are not aware of just how slim the odds of having a ballet career really are. While the bigger, well-known companies usually have junior or second companies that pay a small wage, there are so many other levels of post-graduate training where students and families are spending a lot of money with the odds very much stacked against the dancer. As I said before, I don’t think schools up to the age of 18/19 really prepare dancers for a career, even if they provide great training otherwise. So after graduating from high school, students who choose not to do the university route are scrambling. The very lucky few attended a school affiliated with a company and hope to be admitted to the second company/junior company, but those junior company spots are scarce and often partially filled with international students. Many of the bigger US schools also have post-graduate trainee programs, which I feel are similar to upper school training in the UK and some European company-related schools, in that they work to transition dancers from students into professionals. So at 19-21 parents can still be paying tuition and housing for students chasing the dream. (SAB is different in that they have residential placement for students, so they can bring them in earlier and then the lucky few make it in to the company). Many of the smaller, regional ballet companies have small budgets and the dancers don’t belong to a union, so they use these “trainees” in their productions. Ill intentions or not, I think it is very easy to take advantage of dancers pursuing their dreams. I’m not sure where to draw the line between nurturing the dream and being realistic about a dancer’s chances of success. In the United States there seems to be a lot of opportunities to keep shelling out money until a student or their parents face the reality and move on. I don’t think I have enough experience of the different systems to speak on the differences in embracing individuality. My daughter did say, after attending Royal Ballet summer school, that they did seem to want to mold the year-round students in a very specific, similar way. But then at the same time the dancer they all thought was the most special was the one who was the most unique.

Yes, we pay over $7000/year for non-residential ballet-only training, but the year runs from early September through late May. The cost of summer training to fill in the three month summer gap can easily exceed the year-round tuition. I don’t know if there is a way around the younger kids essentially subsidizing the older ones. If our school charged the same rate per hour to kids dancing six days a week as they do to 4 year-olds dancing one hour a week, no one could afford it. I do think assessing out at a young age is rather harsh, as so much can change as kids go through puberty, both mentally and physically. At 16 my views change a bit, though. Kids who don’t live near schools that do a great job of “finishing” dancers or without the connections to help them get jobs, need to move to schools who can help them. If the best schools stick only to kids who were able to train with them from a young age, where do the kids without that proximity end up? (Maybe this makes more sense in the context of the United States—a huge, sprawling country). I do think we need to keep our eyes wide open about exactly what we are paying for, though. Someone on the US message board said, “Go where you are wanted.” I think that’s a simple, but wonderful, piece of advice. One prestigious school didn’t invite my DD for a second round audition, while another admitted her straight in after the first round, allowing her to skip the second altogether. I know in ballet all paths don’t lead to Rome, but many of them do. A rejection, or being assessed out at one place, doesn’t mean the end of the road.

I always say that schools make their money on the younger students but make their reputation on the older students. At my DDs big name US school, the younger kids pay more tuition per hour of training that the older kids, so filling those lower levels with kids really helps the bottom line. When the kids get older the schools need to really get selective or they won’t be able to have a high success rate when it comes to students getting contracts. And that reputation for turning out professional dancers keeps bringing in the young kids. I do think the excessive assessing out can have an effect on the perception of the quality of training sometimes. Does Royal Ballet really have the absolute best training, or does the fact that they assess out even after two years of upper school skew things? Are their graduates all getting contracts because their training is the best, or because their reputation for placement allows them to recruit only the best and then at the last year cut those they aren’t convinced will succeed?

There are very few residential ballet schools in the US, and the ones that do exist generally start at what is high school age here, meaning 14+ year-olds. Most students live at home with their families and train locally. If there aren’t any good local training options some families move to find it. We are lucky to have good training options, but DD started doing academic school online at 14 because her dance classes started around noon. An issue I do find with ballet schools in the US, is that they tend to follow the same pattern as academic schools, meaning there are long summers with no classes. We don’t have any government funding for ballet, so it is up to the individual schools to find funding for any scholarships. The decisions and choices students make at 16 in the UK don’t really start here until students are 18/19. In my experience ballet schools in the US don’t do enough to prepare kids for the next phase in the ballet journey. They are left to navigate the options of university dance programs, trainee programs (which mean different things at different schools), junior companies, etc. largely on their own. My DD is graduating from US high school a year early and leaving for a program in Europe this fall for this very reason.

For my daughter the 3/4 shank is better because full shanks tended to bend in the wrong place. For a while she wore custom Freeds with the shank cut, but the Classic Pro 90 works well off the shelf because the shank is stiff until it gets to the heel area. It has kind of a graduated hardness, if that makes sense. It not only makes her foot look good because the shank conforms to her foot, but also takes pressure off the shank.

Has she tried shoes with a 3/4 shank? My daughter has strong feet, high arches, wider across the metatarsal but narrow heels. She used to cut her shanks, but now she wears Freed Classic Pro 90. She brushes shellac inside the box and uses Jet Glue to strengthen them so they don’t die as quickly.

Last year we received the invoice in May, but we didn’t receive the handbook for upper school until the very end of June, for a July 19 start date.

In an article about Olga Smirnova leaving the Bolshoi for Dutch National Ballet, it also mentioned that the Dutch National Ballet Academy has accepted seven Ukrainian students to take classes there and has found Dutch families for them to live with. I believe YAGP is using their contacts to try to place students in schools in Europe, including at least one at Princess Grace.

RBS has officially changed their program. As of this year Upper School students are assessed/have to audition again during their second year if they want to stay for the final year. It seems unfair to students who were told they were being accepted to a 3-year Bachelor’s Degree program when they were initially accepted. My daughter knows two young men who were recently told, at 18, that they will not be invited back for the third year.

For Dutch National Ballet’s AD program, you qualify for lower tuition “if you have the nationality of a country in the EU.” I would assume it’s the same for their younger students. They do not have boarding, though, so I believe it’s mostly Dutch students until the age of 16 or so.

None of their logic makes sense. Knowing the height of the parents says nothing about the age at which a child will experience a growth spurt. My dad was 5’9” and my mom was 5’4”. When I was 13 I was only 5’ tall. By 18 I was 5’8”. I grew late for a girl and surpassed any height expectations. My sister, with the very same parents, grew at a completely different rate than I did and ended up a few inches shorter. One of my daughters was always short and the other was always average. Now at 16 and 18 they are 5’8” and 5’9”. None of the height predictors based on parents’ heights or height of the children at 2 years old even came close to predicting their current heights and there was certainly nothing to indicate the age at which they would experience their growth spurts. It seems to me that it would be much more appropriate to ask questions like, “Has your child recently had a growth spurt?” Knowing the heights of my husband and myself certainly didn’t indicate to the school that my 16 year old daughter grew 4” in the year leading up to the summer program, and I feel like that would have been much more helpful for them to know.

We also have crazy long summer breaks from school in the US, usually 11 or 12 weeks. My daughter’s ballet school is closed for over 14 weeks. Kids don’t want to take too long off of dance and there is a lot of pressure to keep in shape, so they pack their summers with intensive programs, which is obscenely expensive for parents. Even a five week program leaves a lot of the summer with no regular classes. My daughter will be starting a year-round program in Europe in the fall and I will be so grateful to get off of the crazy American summer intensive program.

They did international auditions before COVID as well. This isn’t new. It seems to be a universal frustration that companies and the schools associated with them accept students from around the world and that they recruit so heavily from competitions. At American Ballet Theatre, for instance, 3 of the 6 apprentices are not from the United States. In the Studio Company there are at least 4 international dancers (which I believe is lower than in previous years).