StillSewingShoes

Yes, @Peanut68, there is the National Summer Intensive Audition Tour, which is going on right now, where you audition with one of the companies/schools and many others see you at the same time. There doesn't seem to be a great website for the tour itself, but each of the participating companies has posted information about it on their own websites, so I encourage you to Google it!

My daughter has very narrow feet and loves Bloch Elegance.

@Peony - Great points. This has been a very enlightening discussion for me. Much appreciated!

@Kate_N - your point is well taken, as my daughter's ballet school (not RBS), said something along the lines of, "dancers go to Prix de Lausanne to be seen by the top schools in the world, and she's already here..." So, if you're at your dream school, maybe the time, MONEY, effort, energy, nerves, etc. aren't worth it. I have to say that I do like the visibility of competitions, though, and keeping by daughter on the other schools'/companies' radar. So that's what we've been using summer intensives for recently.

For my daughter, we darn around the outside of the box and use an old ribbon from a prior shoe (yay for reusing something!). I use the needle and thread from the "Bunheads Pointe Shoe Stitch Kit" and it works great. It's still a pain and my least favorite thing to do, however. Here's the video that the dance shop in San Francisco gave me to follow that shows how to use the ribbon and again, we darn all the way around the block, not just the front: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo4Za5o-6fI&feature=youtu.be

Well, she was heading into her year-round program last weekend so we had to take the video before she left for that. Otherwise, I probably would have sent it in on the last day. Lol!

My daughter is in the US and we submitted our video to RBS earlier this week. We now sit and wait for 3 months, which I'm very capable of doing!

My daughter is in San Francisco now and her classes have about 15-17 students, which is smaller than last year when it was virtual. She's staying in the new dorm facility practically across the street from the ballet school. She's loving it so far, at 2 weeks out of 5. If you have any specific questions about that one, let me know and I'll ask her next time she calls!

I was encouraged by Nike coming out to support her. Something tells me this conversation is going to flip around very soon and tennis will be making some big changes - which will hopefully spread far/wide in elite sports AND dance.

Also for the girls packing list, consider the following two things that weren't on the list, but that all of the older girls had except for my daughter at the spring session (whoops!): black tights to wear for contemporary class and light skirts to wear when allowed during pointe classes.

My daughter (14 yrs) will be attending the last week this summer at WL. We're hoping no quarantine this time around. She attended the spring intensive as well and LOVED it. Anyone else have a dancer there for the last week (I believe 16-20 August)?