by Megan Burbank
In a low-ceilinged studio at Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Phelps Center in downtown Seattle, two rows of kids from South Seattle’s Maple Elementary stand at a ballet barre on a floor of middle-gray marley. Clad in purple cap-sleeve leotards or white T-shirts and black tights, they move in unison to music played by a pianist in the corner, as former PNB dancer Eric Hipolito Jr. leads them through the first step of every ballet class ever taken: pliés, knee bends that form the basis of numerous steps still to come. As the students move through the static postures that, taken together, form the foundation of classical ballet, Hipolito interjects here and there with jokes, praise, nuggets of guidance: “Make sure there’s space between your fingertips,” he says at one point. At another: “Check if you’re early and check if you’re late.”
When it’s time for rondes de jambes — when each child inscribes a semicircle with their foot, one leg at a time — Hipolito asks if anyone remembers the word for doing this movement in the air or on the ground.
“Something like croissant!” volunteers one of the students in the back row.
“That’s a food, dude,” Hipolito responds gamely. “Croissant” wasn’t a bad guess for an art form so steeped in French vocabulary. He then patiently explains the terminology: à terre, or “on the earth,” and en l’air, or “in the air.”
It’s a moment of levity in an otherwise serious class: Ballet is hard, and it’s hard to keep kids engaged. Lightness helps. So does Hipolito’s innate understanding of the children he teaches. They’re at PNB today as part of DanceChance, a program that brings Seattle Public School students into the ballet school for a crash course in dance. Hipolito first encountered ballet through DanceChance, and was the first student in the program to end up joining the company as a professional. He also attended Maple Elementary, and lives in the same neighborhood as the kids he teaches.
“I really like DanceChance, because I feel like I know that mindset. You know, there are some kids there that get it right away and you see them standing up the tallest and they’re ready to learn,” he says. “But I don’t think I was that kid. I think I probably was the shyer kid in the back just watching, so I also get that aspect … I know what they went through and I can kind of speak their language.”
The program is rooted in the desire to broaden equity within ballet, an art form which, more than most, has a long and problematic history of beauty norms rooted in white supremacy, story ballets that play into racial stereotypes, and figureheads like George Balanchine, whose contributions to the art form are undeniable but who had heavily blurred personal boundaries with his dancers and advocated for deeply racist beauty standards, such as when he said ballerinas had to have a skin tone that matched the color of the inside of an apple.
Ballet is changing — to survive, it has to — as companies reckon with this deep-seated history and work to dismantle long-standing inequities within classical dance, efforts largely begun within the past decade. But DanceChance precedes them. The program launched in 1994 and is part of an effort to “continuously build a healthier, more inclusive culture” in ballet, says program manager Naomi Glass. The program isn’t a recruiting tool, either. It’s very unlikely that the vast majority of participating students will go on to dance professionally, although a few have, and some, like Hipolito, have had careers with PNB. Glass sees the program as a chance for all students who participate to experience movement, community, and engagement with the arts — something especially crucial for kids who missed out on time with their peers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
For those who join the program and end up taking class at PNB, the staff work hard to make them feel comfortable in what can be an intimidating space. “When we invite them here, and they’re 8 years old, to get on a bus and go across town to this place you don’t know with these kids you don’t know and these teachers you don’t know and learn this art form you don’t know, it’s a lot, so we have a whole orientation, and they can come here first and their families have a chance to meet us and share about the program,” says Glass. “But it’s so fun to see them where day one, they’re a little bit nervous. Two weeks later, they walk in like they own this place, and they are just so comfortable.”
Hipolito doubts he would’ve found his way to ballet without DanceChance. Dance hadn’t been a part of his life until then. “I’m also the first generation born in the U.S., so both my parents are immigrants … so I think that was pretty special,” he says. As a kid, Hipolito remembers playing baseball and learning karate. “Ballet was never in my mind to even try and realize I was even good at it,” he says. “So I think that’s one thing the kids don’t realize, especially the younger ones … they have something that we saw, they had the facility or the musicality … We saw something that might be a spark for the future.”
At the end of class, Hipolito’s students join another group to run through a cowboy-inspired dance they’ve learned together and will eventually perform for their families in a larger studio. The steps are simple, but especially for beginning dancers, the sequencing is not. The kids move through their choreography gamely, clapping on and off in unison, miming riding horses, lining up quickly for entrances and exits. At one point, a child in one line gets distracted as her group runs offstage. But another classmate notices, runs briefly back, and the two hurry together to join their group at the edge of the studio.
It’s a tiny moment, but one that speaks to something that can also grow in the confines of a dance studio, if it’s allowed to: a culture of connection and inclusion, of support for other dancers rather than competition, a sense that everyone can belong in ballet, and that thinking they can’t is simply a failure of imagination.
After rehearsal, the kids gather in what’s essentially their green room near the entrance to the building. They carry brightly colored dance bags containing everything they need for class. Ballet is expensive, but in timing the classes for school hours and providing all equipment, the program seeks to reach as many children as possible by removing two of the biggest obstacles: cost and transportation. Their dancing done for today, the kids line up to get back on their buses and return to school. They laugh and joke around together, in a moment that recalls Hipolito’s own memories of his time with DanceChance.
He found some of his best friends among the boys in the program. “We were kind of that DanceChance gang … I didn’t think, ‘Okay, this is only for girls,’” he says. “I was like, ‘Well, there’s 30 other boys doing the same thing.’” Especially for boys, ballet can be intimidating. But Hipolito recalls that being in the program with other boys normalized dancing for him in a way that challenged gender stereotypes; now, as a teacher, he can do the same for his students.
These are lessons he took from the experience that would’ve happened regardless of whether he’d become a professional dancer. And that’s another aspect of teaching, says Hipolito. It’s about much more than ballet. “Not all of them are going to be ballet dancers, and that’s okay,” he says. “They can be really great adults and move on to middle school and do great in other things, too. But I want to teach them how to be good people.”
Megan Burbank is a writer and editor based in Seattle. Before going full-time freelance, she worked as an editor and reporter at the Portland Mercury and The Seattle Times. She specializes in enterprise reporting on reproductive health policy, and stories at the nexus of gender, politics, and culture.
📸 Featured Image: Pacific Northwest Ballet School faculty member Eric Hipolito Jr. with DanceChance students. (Photo: Lindsay Thomas)
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