An Invitation to Donate
We need your help
$22 x 22,000 = hope
COVID-19 took a toll on the performing arts. It cost these aspiring professional ballet dancers their studio. They danced in their bedrooms. They danced in their kitchens. But they didn’t quit. They didn’t give up. Your $22 donation will help us give them a new home. A place to train…A place to dream. You can help. This is their story.
Why are we non-profit?
We believe that a non-profit structure is in the community’s best interest. It allows our community members to participate in the ownership and to share and to nurture the dance conservatory.
We believe that communities that actively invest in excellence for the performing and visual arts see desired growth in all sectors of their community and enhance their cultural diversity.
We do not wish to create a dance education center where one individual or group of individuals can benefit financially from selling the business, the property that the business resides in, or other assets. We believe this promotes instability for the arts organization and the community it serves, and ultimately harms the youth is was created to nurture. Our goal is to establish permanence and longevity in our community and to grow and change directorship as needed without financial repercussions.
Why do we need donors?
Classical ballet dancers are athletes and need rigorous training.
Their daily training schedule is demanding. Advanced ballet dancers can easily train 20+ hours per week. This training is essential to gain the needed technical and artistic competency required to achieve professional status.
Highly qualified faculty must be hired to teach technically sound curriculum and to ensure student safety.
These professionals should have a combination of performance resumes with legitimate professional companies, advanced college education, and teaching experience. In addition, physical trainers and/or physical therapists who understand the unique needs of a ballet dancer need to be accessed.
Class student/faculty ratios need to stay small.
Small class size is a necessity to ensure individual attention and maximize technical and artistic growth in a safe manner. Our conservatory maintains an optimum 8:1 student/faculty ratio.
Pre-professional ballet programs need large amounts of space.
For a program to properly train their dancers, especially as they ascend to the advanced levels, studio size becomes paramount to their success. In addition, several large studio spaces are needed to accommodate the different ages/levels of the program and each level’s rigorous training demands.
Dancers require specially designed floors and equipment that decrease career ending injuries.
Sprung floors, appropriate vinyl flooring, wall-to-wall mirrors, correctly designed barres, and acoustical dampening panels are essential for the dancers’ safety and progress.
Funds are needed for production costs.
It is an essential part of dance training to provide appropriate performance opportunities for conservatory level students. Costs include rehearsal space, theatre rental, professional costumes, sets, choreographers, rehearsal instructors, stage managers, lighting designers, program costs, music expenses… the list goes on and on. In order to keep performances accessible to our community, ticketing and performance fees only cover a small portion of the actual costs to prepare and produce a professional quality concert.
Most importantly, student tuition only covers a fraction of the cost it takes to train a pre-professional ballet student.
Tuition rates are capped in an effort to remain affordable to our community. It is financially impossible for pre-professional dancers to pay what it is actually costing to train them hour per hour; and even with reduced tuition expenses, many dancers still are in need of scholarships to make their training a reality. Imagine an up-and-coming star football player trying to personally pay his coaches hour by hour for all his practices, workouts, and games and trying to rent out the field, the gym, and purchase all the equipment he needs to train. Even when divided among the whole team, it would be financially impossible, right?
Because of the cost of a pre-professional classical ballet program, and the constant struggle to stay afloat financially because of its intrinsic needs, many local studios choose to focus on quality recreational programs instead to increase their studio’s chances of survival. In these programs, students come less and pay more per hour for their instruction.
For instance…
A dance student in Cherokee County taking a one hour class per week will typically pay around $60 a month for those 4 hours of monthly instruction. Conversely, an advanced pre-professional student dancing 20 hours per week will pay about $400 a month for those 80 hours of monthly instruction. The breakdown is a huge reality check: The recreational student is paying $15 per hour of training (the actual cost) verses the advanced pre-professional student who is paying $5 per hour of training (deficit of $10 per hour). Basically, every time a pre-professional student walks through the door, the studio is losing money.
Adding insult to injury, pre-professional programs take up valuable studio space and time after school that then cannot be given to the recreational programs that could - theoretically - help financially underpin the pre-professional programs.
In light of this information, it is easy to see why local studio owners tend to move toward more recreational models of dance education —these programs are valued and a needed and respected part of our dance community. They serve hundreds of students in amazing ways! Getting kids up and moving and offering quality training in different genres of dance is essential to the health and artistic growth of our community. However, the budding ballet dancer who lives down the street, with dreams to dance on a world-class stage, needs something different…
There is a critical need for local, pre-professional classical ballet training programs for dancers who truly have the passion, talent, and dedication. Almost all of the current principal dancers at American Ballet Theatre were at one time that small child walking into their local studio with dreams in their hearts. The initial experience at the local level set these dancers on a trajectory for the rest of their careers. They had legitimate pre-professional training available around the corner.
This is where local donors become an essential part of the process. Your donations make molding the ballet dancers of tomorrow possible. What opportunity awaits the hearts and minds of young dancers in Canton, GA?
Why sponsor a classical ballet student?
Classical ballet is the foundation of most other dance forms. Dancers who are classically trained can easily transition to other dance genres including jazz, modern, contemporary, musical theatre, and hip-hop. Conversely, it is difficult for dancers who neglect daily ballet training to achieve good technique in these other dance genres, and their skills do not transfer to ballet. Classical ballet demands consistent training and is meticulous in nature taking patience, perseverance, and passion on the part of the dedicated artist.
The character traits that ballet dancers develop during their rigorous training are far-reaching and lifelong. Regardless of their eventual career goals, students will never lose the attributes they cultivated while learning classical ballet. Our dancers will have the skills to succeed in whatever arena of life they choose to pursue.
“What I love about the ballet is not that it looks pretty. It’s the method in it. Ballet is about how to behave.” - Lincoln Kirstein
Resilience
There’s a saying that it takes 10 years to make a ballet dancer. Those 10 years can be long and arduous, as well as fulfilling. Student dancers will inevitable have hard days, face setbacks while trying to master difficult skills, encounter discouraging casting decisions, or receive audition rejections. They may be asked to repeat a school level to improve their technical strength. Dancers may become injured and have to face rehabilitation time with tenacity. Learning how to cope with these disappointments while keeping his/her self-worth intact becomes an essential skill to a dancer.
Work Ethic
Students must develop a patience and passion for arduous and meticulous training. Trying to create proper muscle memory and body placement takes years of diligent class work and repetition. Self-motivation, hard work, and seeing one’s progress in small increments helps dancers to appreciate the benefits of working toward long-term goals. With excellence always as the ultimate reward, students thrive knowing there is direct correlation between how hard they work and the end-product of their labor.
Time Management
Excelling in academics remains a top priority for the classical ballet student. Balancing the requirements of schoolwork with the demands of a pre-professional training schedule takes commitment and effort. Learning how to juggle the responsibilities of school, family obligations, and social needs with his/her required dance schedule becomes a way of life for the ballet student.
Teamwork
Ballet is taught primarily in a group setting. An essential aspect of classical ballet training is dancing in the corps de ballet with a large group of dancers. Working side-by-side with peers to achieve a singular goal is one of the highlights of being a ballet dancer. Learning how to be supportive of other dancers while responsibly fulfilling one’s designated role in the company becomes a life skill.
Respect
In the classical ballet world respect is taught from day one: In addition to cultivating self-respect, showing respect for the art form itself and for all its faculty and artists is crucial to the success of any training program. This learned respect transcends the walls of the studio and theatre to whatever arena of life the dancer chooses to enter.