ST. MARY'S CITY, Md. — Elena Voss never set out to start a revolution. When she and three fellow dancers began rehearsing in a borrowed church basement in 2019, they simply wanted to make ballet that looked like the world they actually lived in. Five years later, the St. Mary's City Ballet Collective has grown into a 22-member company whose dancers hail from seven countries—and whose most recent season sold out every performance at the SlackWater Performance Hall.
"We were tired of being told there was one right way for a body to look, or one story worth telling," says Voss, 34, the collective's artistic director. "So we stopped asking for permission."
From Church Basement to Boundary-Breaking Stage
The collective's founding was as much economic as artistic. Voss, a former corps member with a regional company in Baltimore, had moved to St. Mary's City for graduate school at the College of Southern Maryland. She found cheap rent, abundant performance space, and a surprising absence of professional dance within 60 miles.
What began as weekly classes for adults who had quit ballet as teenagers evolved into something more urgent during the pandemic. In 2021, the collective staged its first full production—an outdoor performance in Historic St. Mary's City with dancers spaced 12 feet apart. The setting, Voss says, shaped the company's ethos permanently.
"We realized we could put dancers in a tobacco field, or on a pier, or inside a gallery, and the audience would follow," she says. "Ballet didn't need a proscenium arch. It needed curiosity."
A Company Built on Hybrid Bodies and Hybrid Forms
That curiosity manifests most visibly in the collective's repertory, which deliberately fuses techniques that traditional ballet companies often keep separate. Company member Adeola Ojo, 28, trained in Lagos in both RAD ballet and Afrobeat styles before joining in 2022. Marcus Chen, 26, a Taiwan-born dancer who grew up in Rockville, Md., performed en pointe in the collective's February 2024 premiere of Terra Nova—a choice Voss says was treated as unremarkable.
"The question wasn't should a man do this," Chen says. "It was what does this vocabulary allow us to express?"
The company's current roster includes dancers with backgrounds in Chinese classical dance, Brazilian contemporary, Vogue, and Ukrainian character dance. Rehearsals are structured unusually: rather than a single ballet master, each piece is developed through a "movement council" where dancers contribute vocabulary from their training.
When Silicon Valley Meets the Studio
Technology has become another signature of the company's work, though not without skepticism. In 2023, the collective partnered with researchers at the University of Maryland's Institute for Advanced Computer Studies to develop Riverscape, a 35-minute piece that used motion-capture sensors to project real-time digital brushstrokes behind the dancers.
"The tech had to serve the grief in the piece, not distract from it," says choreographer and company member Samira Okonkwo, who created Riverscape after her mother's death. "Some nights the system glitched and we had to improvise. That felt more honest than a perfect illusion."
The collective has also experimented with augmented reality programs that allow audience members to view additional dancer layers through tablets during select gallery performances. Voss emphasizes that these tools remain secondary to live performance.
"We're not trying to replace the body," she says. "We're asking what the body can't do alone."
Classrooms, Not Just Curtains
For all its avant-garde reputation, the collective spends roughly 40 percent of its annual budget on education programs. Its "Ballet Without Barres" initiative offers free weekly classes to seniors with mobility limitations, using seated and wheelchair-adapted choreography. The "Mirror Wall" program, launched in 2022, provides sliding-scale tuition for dancers ages 14 to 21 from five counties across Southern Maryland.
Tanesha Williams, 17, a Mirror Wall student from Lexington Park, will join the collective's apprentice company next season.
"I thought ballet was for other people—thin, rich, white people," Williams says. "Then I walked into a rehearsal and saw Adeola doing these incredible turns, and Ms. Voss stopped everything to ask what I thought the music sounded like. That had never happened in any dance class I'd taken."
According to the collective's most recent annual report, the education programs served 340 students in 2023, up from 89 in 2021.
What Comes Next
The collective's 2024-25 season will include a November premiere at the Maryland State House in Annapolis—the company's first performance outside St. Mary's City—and a spring collaboration with the Piscataway Indian Nation to develop a piece honoring Indigenous histories of the region.
Voss is candid about
