A Look Back at our 2020 Summer Programs & Our Safe Return to The School | Membership Newsletter – October 2020

As we take a look back at the last several months, we are proud to celebrate so many milestones in such an uncertain time. We recently finished our first-ever summer of entirely virtual programs and welcomed nearly 300 students, ages 10 to 18, into our digital Summer Course, New York Junior Session and California Workshop for Young Dancers. Students were taking classes in their garages, kitchens, and living rooms, and using bunk beds, chairs, and pianos for barres. Our faculty had to innovate and use their creativity to adapt their teaching to fit the smaller spaces. We even had international students from all around the world taking classes in different time zones, including Australia, Kazakhstan, and the United Kingdom – even if that meant dancing well past midnight!

Through it all, our students have shown resilience and dedication to their training, and our faculty, pianists and staff have worked tirelessly to provide the absolute highest standards of training to our students virtually. A highlight of Summer Course is always the Summer Choreography Workshop, and we are so grateful to this year’s choreographers, SAB alumni and New York City Ballet dancers Lauren Lovette and Preston Chamblee, who took on the unique challenge of choreographing entirely over Zoom.

In August, the School began planning its reopening process. We called upon our board members, school leaders, faculty, and staff to help plan the return to our campus, placing the highest priority on the safety of our students and the entire SAB community, in balance with our commitment to providing in-person training for the benefit of our students’ artistic development.

Our new policies encompass strict social distancing guidelines, reduced occupancy, mask-wearing, temperature screenings, enhanced cleaning, closing protocols when illness is present, and travel quarantines. With all of our precautionary plans in place, on September 14th we officially re-opened our studios for in-person training, and it was an incredible sight to finally see our students back in class.

We have launched the new Winter Term with a hybrid training model that offers both in-person training in our studios, as well as virtual training online. Our class sizes are drastically smaller to allow for safe social distancing, and the number of classes we hold have tripled to accommodate this change. Training hours have been extended from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. on many days. Our Student Life department has been facilitating programming to help students remain connected despite the difficulties of not being able to socialize in person. In addition to daily ballet classes, our faculty has been working with students in Pilates and Weight Training and Conditioning classes to keep them as mentally and physically strong as they can be.

We are thrilled to welcome SAB alumna Aesha Ash to our permanent faculty after two years as our Visiting Faculty Chair. Following her years as an SAB student, she went on to dance with New York City Ballet, as well as with Béjart Ballet de Lausanne, Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet, and Christopher Wheeldon’s Morphoses. SAB’s faculty are the lifeblood of the School and as an educator, Ms. Ash brings a depth and breadth of experience, both within the Balanchine tradition and beyond, that puts her in an excellent position to guide and nurture our students as they prepare for their professional careers. And her appointment is history-making – she is the first Black woman to join SAB’s permanent faculty.

To fill the position that Aesha held for the past two years, SAB is pleased to welcome two new Visiting Faculty chairs for the 2020-21 Winter Term — Alicia Holloway and Leyland Simmons, who are both SAB alumni. Ms. Holloway is a dancer with Dance Theatre of Harlem and Mr. Simmons is the Dance Director for Harlem School of the Arts and Co-Founder of Moving Education Institute. Learn more about Alicia in the next article, From Student to Visiting Faculty Chair: An Interview with Alicia Holloway.

In addition, New York City Ballet dancers Daniel Applebaum, Maria Kowroski and Teresa Reichlen, who have been New York City Ballet Teaching Fellows at SAB in recent years, will be teaching this Winter Term as guest faculty.

The next important phase of our fall reopening is the return of SAB’s residential student population. We initiated a gradual reopening of our onsite Residence Hall in mid-October in order to accommodate New York’s quarantining requirements for out-of-state travelers. We also segmented our residential population into fall and spring cohorts in order to provide for proper distancing in our living quarters, with those not in residence at any given time taking their daily SAB classes via Zoom. Our fall cohort will be fully in place by early November. Our professional Student Life staff and resident students have shown great resilience as they adapt to the new protocols necessary to operate safely amidst a pandemic and we have been so moved to see our students’ unwavering devotion and commitment to their training amidst the many adjustments needed so far this year.

As we move forward with the Winter Term, SAB will continue to adjust in any way necessary in order to continue providing our students with the best training possible while keeping them safe and healthy. We are confident that despite the challenges and uncertainty, George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein’s clear and bold mission to train young dancers for professional careers in classical ballet will continue as strongly as ever this year.