2020 National Audition Tour Wrap Up

For most people, January simply marks the start of a new year with colder weather and perhaps a few resolutions, but for dancers, it holds an even bigger significance. As any young dancer will tell you, January is synonymous with audition time! All month long, the School of American Ballet holds auditions across the nation to recruit talented dancers for our three summer course programs. 2020 was no different. Members of our faculty traveled to all corners of the country to audition and place students in either our main Summer Course, our New York Junior Session or our California Workshop, held in Orange County, CA.

This year, we held auditions up and down the west coast – from Seattle to San Diego – as well as in Miami, Chicago, Ohio, Boston, Salt Lake City, Dallas, Denver, New Orleans, Charlotte, Tampa, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, and Washington DC. Covering this much ground in just a month required our faculty to split up locations and often travel to two or more cities every weekend. If that weren’t enough, we also held several summer course auditions at our headquarters in New York as well.

“We try to make sure we find everyone we feel should come to our SAB summer courses,” Kay Mazzo, SAB’s Chairman of Faculty explains. This is why the audition tour is such a crucial part of the process. Distance doesn’t deter SAB from finding and fostering talent.

While our National Audition Tour is a bit of a whirlwind, we do enjoy being out on the road and seeing all the incredibly talented dancers from various studios and schools. What’s more, our faculty pretty much always runs into SAB alumni or previous SAB guest teachers while on the tour, making it often feel like a series of mini-reunions in each city.

Just as in the past, our Audition Tour was a huge success this year and we are so grateful to all the dancers who came out to audition. As the final acceptance letters have been sent, we are now starting to prep for what is sure to be a fantastic series of summer programs.

Until next year’s tour – that’s a wrap!