By Maya Chen, 17, Century High School
The following is a first-person account from a Bismarck-area student dancer.
The playbills on my bedroom wall tell their own story: Clara in The Nutcracker at age 12. Swanilda in Coppélia at 15. This spring, I'll dance my first Odette in Ballet Bismarck's student production. Each program marks not just a role, but hundreds of hours at the barre in a city where serious ballet training means working with what you have—and occasionally driving five hours to Minneapolis for a summer intensive.
I started at age three, the usual story, at [Studio Name] because my mother needed an after-school activity and I liked the pink tights. What kept me there was harder to explain. I remember watching a video of Misty Copeland's Firebird at age nine and pausing it every few seconds to study her foot placement. I didn't have words for it then, but I wanted to understand how she made hard look effortless.
That curiosity turned into discipline around sixth grade, when my instructor, Elena Voss, refused to let me start pointe work until my ankles were strong enough. I was furious at the time. Every friend my age seemed to be on pointe already. Voss sat me down and said, "Maya, you can go up early and come down injured, or you can wait and still be dancing at thirty." I waited eight months. She was right, and that lesson—delayed gratification in service of longevity—has shaped how I approach everything now.
Ballet Bismarck, where I've trained since I was eleven, isn't a feeder school for a major company. We don't have a full-time resident choreographer or a company orchestra. What we do have is a tight community of dancers, parents, and instructors who fundraise for costumes, repaint the studio floors themselves, and drive through blizzards to make rehearsal. The scarcity forces a kind of creativity. When I wanted to work on my contemporary partnering skills last year, my instructor connected me with a former dancer in Fargo via Zoom. We met in person once a month. It wasn't ideal, but it worked.
The physical demands are real and unglamorous. Last winter I developed tendonitis in my left ankle during preparations for Coppélia. I spent six weeks in a walking boot, doing upper-body conditioning in the corner of the studio while my classmates rehearsed without me. The isolation was worse than the pain. What brought me back was a single moment: my first full rehearsal after clearance, when I managed 16 clean fouettés and Voss simply nodded—no applause, just acknowledgment that I was back where I needed to be. That nod meant more than a standing ovation.
What I didn't expect was how ballet would rewire my relationship with expression. I'm naturally reserved. In conversation, I overthink before I speak. Onstage, that self-editing disappears. Last spring, dancing the lead in Giselle's mad scene, I wasn't thinking about technique. I was thinking about betrayal and grief and how those emotions live in the collarbone, the wrist, the angle of the head. The audience was silent. Afterward, a woman I didn't know told me she'd lost her sister to addiction and that the performance helped her feel seen. I still don't fully know what to do with that. But it changed why I dance.
The sacrifices are substantial and shared. My parents have spent roughly 15 hours a week driving me to and from the studio for years. I've missed school dances, birthday parties, and one family reunion. My closest friends are dancers because they're the only ones who truly understand the schedule. There's an opportunity cost to this life, and I try not to romanticize it.
This fall, I'm auditioning for pre-professional programs in Chicago and Kansas City. The odds of a professional career are narrow; I know the statistics. If it doesn't work out, I'll still have the discipline to finish a college degree, the body awareness that carries into physical therapy or dance medicine, and the memory of what it feels like to work at something for fourteen years without guarantee of outcome.
Ballet on the Northern Plains isn't the obvious path. But it's my path, built barre by barre, blizzard by blizzard, and I wouldn't trade it.
KFYR News
