By Elena Voss | May 10, 2024
On a Thursday evening in March, the Lake City Dance Centre on Meridian Avenue was still humming at 9 p.m. In Studio B, 22-year-old Maya Chen ran through fouettés for her upcoming debut with Ballet Arizona. Down the hall, choreographer Julian Okonkwo watched dancers rehearse a new work that weaves Hmong harvest rituals into a classical suite. Five years ago, neither scene would have been possible. Today, they're almost routine.
Lower Lake City has become an unexpected ballet hub—and it's happening fast.
From Strip Mall to Spotlight
The city's ballet roots were modest and mostly invisible for decades. A single school, the Lower Lake Academy of Dance, operated out of a converted storefront on Hawthorne Road from 1987 until its closure in 2014. Enrollment never topped 80 students. "It was lovely but isolated," says Diane Kowalski, who directed the academy for its final 12 years. "We had talent, but no pathway forward."
The turning point arrived in 2019, when philanthropist and former tech executive Robert Yao opened the Lake City Dance Centre: a 34,000-square-foot facility with four sprung-floor studios, a 200-seat black-box theater, and subsidized rehearsal space. Yao's $14 million investment arrived with a condition: resident companies had to commit at least 30% of their programming to local artists.
That same year, Okonkwo founded Groundwork Ballet, the city's first professional company. In 2021, former San Francisco Ballet soloist Lena Park launched the Lake City Conservatory. What followed was less a gradual climb than a sudden lurch onto the national map.
The Dancers Leaving—and Returning
The numbers are striking. Since 2022, at least nine dancers trained exclusively in Lower Lake City have joined regional or national companies, including Chen at Ballet Arizona and 19-year-old Diego Morales, who became the first corps member from the city at Boston Ballet last August.
Chen's trajectory illustrates the shift. She started at age seven with the Lower Lake Youth Ensemble, a community program that didn't exist before 2020. At 15, she trained full-time at the conservatory. Now she's preparing her first principal role, in Balanchine's Allegro Brillante.
"The weird thing is coming back," Chen said during a break in rehearsal. "When I visit, there are three more studios, two more companies. It changed while I was gone."
That visibility has driven enrollment. The conservatory now trains 140 pre-professional students, up from 47 in its first year. The youth ensemble, which offers free Saturday classes at four community centers, served 400 children last year, two-thirds from low-income households.
But growth has also strained the ecosystem.
New Work, Old Debates
Okonkwo's fusion of classical technique with Hmong, Somali, and Dakota traditions has drawn audiences who never attended ballet before. His 2023 piece Borrowed Season, set to a score by local electronic composer Sven Johansen, sold out its eight-performance run and was picked up by Tulsa Ballet for its 2024-25 season.
Not everyone applauds the direction. Kowalski, now an advisor to the youth ensemble, worries that contemporary programming is crowding out foundational training. "If you want to send dancers to major companies, you can't skip the classics," she said. "Julian's work is beautiful. But is it ballet? That's a real conversation here."
Okonkwo shrugs off the critique. "The form evolves or it dies," he said. "Our audience isn't coming for Sleeping Beauty. They're coming because they see themselves onstage."
Attendance supports his point. Groundwork Ballet's subscriber base has grown 60% since 2022, with median audience age dropping from 61 to 38.
The Price of a Renaissance
For all the success, tension runs through the community. Rents near the Dance Centre have climbed 34% since 2019, pushing several longtime artists out of their apartments and, in one case, forcing a small modern dance collective to relocate to a neighboring suburb. Several school directors privately complain that Yao's funding concentrates resources on a handful of institutions while smaller programs struggle for survival.
Post-pandemic recovery also remains uneven. While Groundwork and the conservatory operate in the black, two newer companies founded in 2022 have already closed, undone by fragile donor relationships and audience retention that lagged pre-pandemic norms.
"We're not a ballet city yet," Park said. "We're a city with a ballet moment. The question is whether we can sustain it."
What Comes Next
This June, the Lake City Dance Centre will host its first national audition, with representatives from five regional companies scheduled to attend. Chen
