At 6:15 on a Tuesday morning, the lights are already on inside the Cherryville Ballet Academy's Studio 4. Through the windows, steam rises from the paper mill across the river—the same mill that employed half the town two generations ago. Inside, 19-year-old Maria Chen from Shenzhen is rehearsing a Giselle variation she will perform next month as a new soloist with the National Ballet of Canada. She is the fourth academy graduate to join a major company this year.
Chen had never seen snow when she arrived in 2021, and she had never heard of Cherryville, Ohio. "I came for one teacher," she says. "Now I tell everyone back home: if you want to dance, this is where you go."
From Industrial Decline to International Enrollment
Cherryville's transformation into an unlikely ballet hub has been swift and specific. In 2019, the Cherryville Ballet Academy enrolled 87 students, nearly all from within the state. This year, it houses 340 students from 34 countries, including 14 from Brazil, 22 from South Korea, and 31 from across Eastern Europe. The academy's artistic director, former American Ballet Theatre principal dancer Viktor Kowalski, launched the international recruitment program in 2020 after relocating from New York City. "I could build something here that I couldn't afford elsewhere," Kowalski says. "The cost of living meant we could pay faculty properly and keep tuition half what it is in Manhattan or London."
That faculty now includes Kowalski's former ABT colleague Paloma Herrera, who teaches advanced repertoire, and choreographer Jermaine Miller, late of Alvin Ailey, who joined in 2022 to build a contemporary ballet program. Their presence has helped the academy place 23 graduates into professional companies since 2021, including the Royal Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, and Dutch National Ballet.
The Money and the Tensions Behind the Boom
The growth has not happened in a vacuum. In 2021, the Cherryville city council redirected $4.2 million in federal pandemic relief funds toward arts infrastructure, including the renovation of the 1927 Rialto Theater into a 650-seat performance venue and the construction of 48 subsidized apartments for academy students and staff. Local businesses have followed: Riverfront Roasters, a coffee shop two blocks from the studios, reports that 35 percent of its revenue now comes from academy families. Hotel occupancy in Cherryville hit a 20-year high in 2023, according to the regional tourism board.
Mayor Jane Thompson, who pushed for the arts funding package, defends the investment against critics who argued the money should have gone to workforce training. "We lost 2,800 manufacturing jobs between 2001 and 2019," she says. "Ballet didn't cause that, and pretending we can bring those jobs back won't fix it. What ballet has done is put us on a map we weren't on before."
Not everyone is celebrating. At a city council meeting in March, longtime resident and former steelworker Dale Morrison questioned whether public funds should support an institution where, by the academy's own count, only 28 percent of students are American. Rents in Cherryville's historic district have risen 34 percent since 2021, according to Census Bureau estimates, and some local artists say they have been priced out of the same performance spaces the city renovated. "I'm glad the kids are dancing," Morrison told the council. "I'm just asking who this is actually for."
The Hidden Costs of Excellence
The academy's intensifying reputation has also drawn scrutiny to the pressures of pre-professional training. Dr. Elena Voss, a sports psychologist who consults with the academy, says she has seen a 40 percent increase in requests for mental health support among students in the past two years. "These are young people who have left everything familiar for a one-in-fifty shot at a company contract," Voss says. "The academy is trying to address this, but the culture of ballet is not gentle."
Kowalski acknowledges the tension. This fall, the academy will reduce its maximum weekly class load from 42 hours to 36 and will require monthly check-ins with Voss's team. "We are not running a survival contest," he says. "If we burn through these dancers, we have failed them and ourselves."
What Comes Next
The academy is now fundraising for a $12 million expansion that would add three studios, a 200-seat black-box theater, and on-site physical therapy facilities. If financing is secured, construction would begin in spring 2025. Separately, Kowalski is in talks with the International Ballet Competition's board to host a junior division event in Cherryville in 2026.
For Chen, who leaves for Toronto in August, the town's future ambitions matter less
