Elena Kunikova on Teaching, Training, and the Art of Ballet
Release Date: 02/25/2026
Ballet's Bottom Line: Finances, Contracts, and the Fight for Dancer Rights
Ballet Help Desk
Listen to Ballet Help Desk ad-free on Patreon: Every ballet company's tax return is public record. Most dancers have never seen one. Liza Yntema, founder of the Dance Data Project, and Griff Braun, National Organizing Director at the American Guild of Musical Artists, walk us through what the numbers reveal. We start with the 990, how to read it, and what a company's revenue structure tells you about its priorities. From there we get into the funding landscape, leadership compensation, and why the gap between what artistic directors make and what dancers make is worth paying attention to. On...
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Train in Germany, Dance in Europe: The Palucca Path to a Professional Ballet Career
Ballet Help Desk
Listen to Ballet Help Desk ad-free on Patreon: What does ballet training look like when it's housed inside a 100-year-old university, with the Semperoper Ballet as your next-door neighbor? We sat down with Rector and Vice-Rector of in Dresden, Germany, for a close look at one of Europe's most distinctive training models. Students can enter as young as 10, earn a bachelor's degree by 18, and perform side-by-side with professional dancers at Semperoper Ballet while still enrolled. We covered how ballet training works in Germany versus the U.S., what the BA program looks like day-to-day, how...
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What Happens When You Choose Harvard Over the Company Contract
Ballet Help Desk
Listen to Ballet Help Desk ad-free on Patreon: What happens when a dancer who traded pre-professional ballet training at the John Cranko School and the Joffrey Ballet Studio Company for a Harvard degree? Or when a dancer who received offers from the training programs at Joffrey, Colorado Ballet, and Philadelphia Ballet decides that college was always the plan? We sat down with and , co-directors of the , to explore one very compelling way to keep ballet in your life without a professional contract and the decisions that brought them to Cambridge and what they found when they got there....
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Zurich Dance Academy's Jason Beechey on Pre-Pro Training and the Future of Ballet
Ballet Help Desk
Listen to Ballet Help Desk ad-free on Patreon: Jason Beechey has spent his career shaping pre-professional ballet training. After 18 years as rector of Palucca University of Dance in Dresden, he now serves as Director of and Head of Dance at the Zurich University of the Arts. He walks us through how Zurich Dance Academy actually works: the rotating teacher model, the health team, and how mental resilience, nutrition, and career management are woven directly into the curriculum as graded work, not afterthoughts. He also talks honestly about what happens after graduation, and how the school is...
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College vs. Postgrad: What One Nevada Ballet Dancer's Path Can Teach Us
Ballet Help Desk
Listen to Ballet Help Desk ad-free on Patreon: What happens when a dancer skips the postgrad route entirely and still lands a professional contract? Paityn Lauzon, now in her fourth season as a company artist with Nevada Ballet Theatre, did exactly that. She grew up at a small competition studio in Arizona, turned down a spot at Joffrey New York at 14, and later chose Indiana University so she could study astrophysics alongside ballet. She dropped out during COVID, moved back home to Arizona, and used the year to fall back in love with ballet before returning to finish her degree. In this...
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Are Swan Lake, Giselle and Sleeping Beauty Still Relevant? Fran Makes the Case
Ballet Help Desk
Listen to Ballet Help Desk ad-free on Patreon: Timothee Chalamet said no one cares about ballet anymore. Fran Veyette disagrees. He's back on #NoThirds, and this episode goes deep into one of the most debated questions in the ballet world right now: are the classical, full-length ballets still relevant? Swan Lake. Giselle. Sleeping Beauty. Romeo and Juliet. These are the stories that have filled theaters for over a century. But in a world where audiences have shorter attention spans and higher expectations, do they still have something to say? Fran, a former principal dancer, choreographer,...
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Pre-Pro to Professional Ballet Training | Jen Sommers of Houston Ballet Academy
Ballet Help Desk
Listen to Ballet Help Desk ad-free on Patreon: How long can your dancer stay home before it starts to matter? It's one of the most common questions ballet parents face, and one of the most consequential. Jen Sommers, Director of joins us to talk through exactly that, along with everything else families need to understand about the road from pre-professional training to a professional dance career. Jen is refreshingly direct about how much a company-affiliated environment matters, and it goes well beyond technique. We talk about what dancers gain from being adjacent to a professional...
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Gavin Larsen: Infinite Steps and the Truth About Ballet Careers
Ballet Help Desk
Listen to Ballet Help Desk ad-free on Patreon: Author, teacher, and former principal dancer Gavin Larsen has spent her post-performance life doing something she loves just as much as dancing: drawing stories out of other people. Her new book, Infinite Steps: 33 Dancers and Their Lives in Ballet, grew out of a collaboration with longtime ABT staff photographer Gene Schiavone, who wanted the dancers behind his archive of images to be truly known, not just catalogued. In this conversation, Gavin sits down with us to talk about what surprised her while interviewing 33 dancers across generations...
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Dancer Stories: Charlotte Junge of Madison Ballet on Going Pro, Paying Rent, and Finding Yourself
Ballet Help Desk
Listen to Ballet Help Desk ad-free on Patreon: What does it really take to go from pre-professional student to professional ballet dancer? Charlotte Junge, a company member with Madison Ballet, shares the unfiltered version of her journey from competition dance roots in Houston to training at Boston Ballet School through the height of COVID, to landing her contract via an Instagram DM from Artistic Director Ja' Malik. But the conversation doesn't stop at the audition story. Charlotte gets refreshingly honest about the financial realities of dancing at a smaller non-union company, the side...
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Madison Ballet's Ja'Malik Is Done with the Old Way
Ballet Help Desk
Listen to Ballet Help Desk ad-free on Patreon: Madison Ballet's Ja'Malik didn't arrive to tinker around the edges. He came to change things, and four years in, it's working. He shares a journey that started with Michael Jackson's Thriller in his front yard and led him through the Joffrey Ballet School, the Ailey school, and North Carolina Dance Theater before landing him in the director's chair in Wisconsin. He talks about what it was like to grow up in ballet without seeing anyone who looked like him on stage, what finally changed that, and why he's determined to make sure the next...
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What does it actually feel like to train at the Vaganova Academy, the school that produced some of the greatest dancers in history, and then go on to perform at one of Russia's most storied companies? Elena Kunikova has lived that story, and she's generous enough to share it.
In this episode, we talk about what serious Vaganova method training actually looks like from the inside, why character dance matters more than most ballet training programs realize, and how the pandemic turned her into one of the most sought-after online ballet coaches working today. We also get into the questions ballet parents of pre-professional dancers tend to lose sleep over: when to start thinking about a professional path, whether early specialization in one style helps or hurts, and what it actually means to teach a student how to work.
Elena has been in ballet for, as she puts it, about 300 years. She has the stories to prove it.
Interested in working with Elena? Learn more here.
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