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Peter Stark, president and director of The Rock School for Dance Education, has spent 26 years running ballet schools and knows the recruiting process from both sides of the table.

We talk with him about how he evaluates students for recruitment. We also cover how his approach has changed over the years, including how he now weighs student conduct and how his views on age and late starters have shifted. Stark discusses what full-time training requires of a teenager beyond technical preparation, including conversations about consent, hygiene, and roommate dynamics that families need to have before their dancer moves away from home.

Stark also discusses what "fitting in" means at the corps de ballet level and why understudying matters at every stage of a dancer's career, not just early on.

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Our parent panel is back for part two, picking up right where we left off.

In this half of the conversation, Erin, Sarah, and Sue cover the topics that come up most for families navigating full-time residential training: how a highly competitive environment can affect a dancer's confidence, how SAB, Houston Ballet Academy, and Canada's National Ballet School each approach annual cuts, and how the academic models differ across the three programs.

The conversation also gets into the pressure dancers carry during audition season, the friendships that form in competitive training environments, and what it looks like to keep family life running when your dancer is living far from home.

We close with the advice each parent would offer a family just starting this journey, and the one thing they would tell themselves on drop-off day.

Learn more about full-time ballet training on our website.

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We are so excited to be publishing part 1 of this 2 part interview. It's something we've wanted to do for a long time. Three parents of dancers who attended some of the largest full-time training programs in North America joined us for an in-depth and candid conversation about what it was like, from the family's perspective, to allow their teenagers to head off to full-time training while they were still in their teens.

Erin Miller's son, Wesley, attended Canada's National Ballet School and now dances with Boston Ballet. Sarah Borden's daughter, Charlotte, went clear across the country from their home in Washington to attend the full-time program at the School of American Ballet. And Sue McCarroll's son, Owen, left home to attend Houston Ballet Academy, where he is currently in their professional training program.

We went into so much depth that we're breaking this conversation into two parts. Across both episodes, we dig into how each family made the decision to send their dancer off, what factors ultimately drove that decision, what it was like to drop their child off, and how the adjustment went, not just for the dancer, but for the siblings and parents left at home. The conversation also covers the difference between training at a company-affiliated school versus a conservatory, and pushes back on the assumption that Balanchine-trained dancers are limited to a small handful of companies after graduation.

Learn more about full-time ballet training on our website.

• Shop Summer Intensive Essentials Guide
• Buy Summer Corrections Journals
• Read Our Ballet School Summer & Year-Round Reviews
• Support Ballet Help Desk
• Instagram: @BalletHelpDesk
• Facebook: BalletHelpDesk
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Music from #Uppbeat:
https://uppbeat.io/t/ian-aisling/new-future
License code: MGAW5PAHYEYDQZCI