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Ever wonder what it actually takes to move up through the ranks at a major ballet company's school, and what happens once your dancer gets there? We sat down with Adam Sklute, artistic director of Ballet West, and Evelyn Cisneros-Legate, who runs Ballet West Academy, to find out.

They walk us through how the academy trains dancers from age three all the way up, and how the trainee program Sklute built actually works day to day. We also get into mentorship: how the school handles those honest, sometimes hard conversations with dancers about where they stand before contract decisions come down.

Then the conversation opens up to the bigger picture. Ballet has a postgrad math problem: way more dancers than paid contracts. Sklute and Cisneros-Legate talk candidly about that gap, the idea of getting artistic directors more direct access to watch dancers across schools, and the case for rethinking what counts as success at the postgrad level.