At 6:45 on a Tuesday morning, the streetlights are still on along Main Street in Towner, North Dakota. Inside a converted 1940s feed store, fourteen-year-old Mara Ellingsen is already at the barre, warming up her feet in hand-me-down pointe shoes. By 8:00 a.m., she will have completed an hour of Vaganova technique before catching the school bus.
Towner is a town of roughly 500 people in McHenry County, surrounded by wheat fields and cattle pastures. It has no traffic light, no chain grocery store, and—on paper—no business sustaining serious ballet training. Yet for the past fifteen years, it has quietly produced dancers who have gone on to trainee programs, university dance departments, and regional companies across the Midwest. The engine behind that pipeline is a pair of small, fiercely dedicated schools: Towner Ballet Theatre and Towner Dance Academy.
A Converted Feed Store and a Gamble
Towner Ballet Theatre began in 2009, when Elena Voss, a former company dancer with Milwaukee Ballet II, moved to McHenry County with her husband and found herself forty-five minutes from the nearest dance studio. She started teaching six students in a church basement. By 2012, enrollment had outgrown the space, and Voss leased a weathered feed store on Main Street, installing sprung floors and a wall of mirrors herself.
"We had no money for a marquee," Voss said. "Parents knew class was happening because the lights were on at dawn."
Today, Towner Ballet Theatre enrolls 87 students—roughly one in six residents of the town—drawn from Towner and surrounding farming communities as far as ninety miles away. The school follows a rigorous Vaganova syllabus, with students progression from pre-ballet through Level 8. The faculty now includes two additional former professional dancers: Marcus Chen, who danced with Kansas City Ballet, and soloist-turned-pedagogue Ingrid Bjørnstad, a native of Oslo who relocated to North Dakota in 2017.
The results have begun to show. Since 2016, five Towner Ballet Theatre alumni have entered trainee or second-company positions at Pacific Northwest Ballet, Houston Ballet, and Oklahoma City Ballet. Another dozen have earned dance scholarships at universities including Indiana University and the University of Utah.
A Complementary Neighbor
Three blocks south, Towner Dance Academy occupies a renovated storefront that once housed a hardware store. Founded in 2014 by local arts advocate Denise Harwood, the academy takes a broader approach. Alongside ballet, it offers jazz, tap, contemporary, and musical theater, serving 112 students from ages three to adult.
Where Towner Ballet Theatre functions as a pre-professional funnel, Towner Dance Academy emphasizes accessibility and cross-training. Many students study at both schools—taking Vagonova classes with Voss in the morning and jazz or contemporary with Harwood's faculty in the afternoon.
"They fill different needs," said Harwood, whose own daughter trained at both schools before joining a contemporary company in Minneapolis. "Not every kid wants to go pro. Some want to be triple threats. Some just want to move."
The academy's faculty includes teachers with credits in regional theater, commercial dance, and competitive gymnastics. Tuition runs roughly $65 to $140 per month depending on class load, and both schools offer work-study arrangements and sliding-scale scholarships to accommodate families in a county where the median household income sits below the state average.
The Economics of Rural Training
How does a town of 500 support two dance schools? The answer lies in geography and community organization. Towner sits at the junction of two state highways, making it a practical meeting point for families spread across McHenry, Pierce, and Benson counties. Many students commute thirty to sixty miles each way, carpooling in pickup trucks and Subarus.
Housing costs in Towner are among the lowest in North Dakota. That has allowed both schools to keep overhead manageable—and to attract out-of-town faculty willing to trade coastal salaries for mortgage payments under $800 a month. Voss and her husband bought a three-bedroom house on two acres for $92,000 in 2011.
"It would be impossible to do this in Chicago or even Fargo," Voss said. "Here, we can charge what families can actually pay."
Local businesses have also bought in. The Towner Café donates post-class cinnamon rolls for Saturday intensives. A farm equipment dealer sponsors the academy's annual recital. In 2019, the community raised $34,000 in six weeks to replace the ballet theatre's aging HVAC system.
One Dancer's Morning
For Mara Ellingsen, the fourteen-year-old at the barre, the routine is exacting. She wakes at 5:30 a.m. three days a week, drives twenty-three miles with her mother from their farm near
