Ballet blues: losing a classic art in Classic City

I started taking ballet classes when I was three years old. Ballet has been an activity I have been passionate about for a long time, but especially in the past few years, the options for ballet classes are limited. 

Throughout my life I’ve taken ballet at many different studios. Center City was by far my best experience with a dance studio. The classes, which I attended two times a week, were challenging but still enjoyable, as I was learning many new things and improving my techniques. By the time I was 11 I had started taking pointe. Though slightly painful, I loved it and was excited to learn more about the techniques. Then in 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic caused the studio to close. 

I returned to the activity in 9th grade, happy to relearn what I had forgotten. But eventually I felt like I wasn’t learning anything new or improving at all. We were doing so much work on choreography for performances and spending less time on technique, and the classes were reduced to only one day a week. 

Only having one class a week seemed fine at first but as time went on I started to feel the downsides. I was never able to build my ankle strength back up enough to start taking pointe again safely, and I wasn’t improving enough to start the next level of classes but also felt that I had improved enough that the level I was in became repetitive. I was disappointed and lost interest in the activity. Eventually I stopped attending classes.  

While I’m not planning on pursuing ballet professionally, it is something that I have loved participating in since I was very young, and it saddens me to see the lack of ballet in Athens.    

What I’ve found to be the issue is that many studios are incredibly focused on company and competitions, to the point that classes and schedules become geared towards those involved in that side of the activity. For people involved in dance companies this system works for them, because they’re taking lots of different kinds of dance multiple times a week. For someone who just wanted to take ballet to learn, it really didn’t.

The other side of this is that while many studios offer lots of classes very few of those are ballet classes. On average dance studios in Athens offer about 24 youth classes total with an average of only seven being exclusively ballet or pointe.     

It has become virtually impossible for anyone who wants to go into classical dance to do so in Athens. Those who want to focus on ballet training specifically would have to travel to the Atlanta area. 

To paraphrase one of my former ballet instructors, the classic city has no classic dance.