Boston Ballet School, Newton MA

"As a child danced with the Boston Ballet and have many fond memories of the older dancers and being shown how to bring out the flowers at the end of Coppelia to present to the ballerina, and then to keep it moving to stage left exit pursued by an unbearable sense of how cool she was like a professional athlete. I believe Bruce Marks was there then and I think what he is doing with the city dance program and making sure Boston Ballet is connected to community and serving and engaging with the youth of Boston so kids see themselves represented on the stage is the right way to use an institution like Boston Ballet lest it lose its vitality as some elite and culturally irrelevant artifact. In any case it was a special place to be a little child because everyone was kind and kind of beautiful and inspirational in a way grownups dont maybe realize how much kids pay attention but I felt a sense that it was a company that was young and vibrant and respected and professional and full of potential which time has borne to prove my young observations true. Any child born in the 70s in Boston I believe inherits some of the trauma of that city and it was a gift to have dance presented in a loving way I have nothing but warm memories at 19 Clarendon St. and 270 Tremont St. I will remind you this was the 1980s which is not one of our best decades as earthlings on this planet (my first memories of tv was thinking oh my god television is boring are they just gonna show Iran Contra hearings all day everyday - must a child look at Oliver North sitting there looking like an abandoned puppy for ever on this thing?) So thank you to the adults at and around Boston Ballet at the time for being the grownups in the room and giving us somewhere to dance when not in class at Martin Luther King elementary school in Cambridge. I remember dancing in the Nutcracker performances and the world of backstage Wang theater. I don’t remember I was young but I think we got paid a dollar a performance and I made maybe $18 not adjusted for inflation. I felt a quiet sense of pride for being a professional dancer with my little check from Boston Ballet I hope they still do that with the kids. As an aside, I remember seeing the Alvin Ailey company performing on I believe Super Bowl Sunday when it was patriots Bears game and thinking my mom needed to get her values straight but time has shown she was right with her determination to culture us and wisdom is justified by all her children."

"Excellent dance school, serious and detailed oriented, but with a fantastic approach to dealing with children of all ages!"