As our company dancers are returning to the stage at Peter Martin Wege Theatre and a new season is taking shape, I find myself thinking about a word we use often at Grand Rapids Ballet: world-class. It’s easy to say and perhaps harder to explain. I want to share with you some reasons why I believe world-class matters not just for this organization, but for our community and for the state of Michigan.
“World-class” isn’t just a marketing word. It’s a description of caliber — the years of training behind every extended line, the precision behind every turn, the artistry that turns steps into storytelling. Our dancers are recruited from across the country and around the world, chosen not simply because they can dance, but because they can move an audience. When you sit in our theater, you are watching artists who could be on stages in New York, in Europe, anywhere in the world — and they have chosen to build their careers here, in Grand Rapids.
That choice matters more than people sometimes realize. A professional ballet company is not a luxury for a community — it’s cultural infrastructure, on the same order as our museums, our universities, our concert halls. It tells the world that Michigan is a place where world-class art lives, not just a place people leave to go find it. Every family who experiences a live, professional ballet performance without leaving Michigan is experiencing something our state deserves and something we intend to keep building.
But I want to be careful not to let “world-class” become an abstraction, because it isn’t one. It lives in the bodies of our dancers. Ballet is one of the only artforms where the artist’s own body is the instrument, the medium, and the message, all at once. A painter can set down the brush at the end of the day. A dancer’s body is always the work — shaped by years of training, sustained by discipline most of us can barely imagine, and vulnerable to injury and time in a way few other professions are. When we call our dancers world-class, we are talking about elite athletes and consummate artists in the same breath, because that is exactly what they are.
That recognition is exactly why, this year, we launched a new professional development program for our company dancers — one that places them in administrative and artistic internships across the organization, giving them hands-on experience in arts administration alongside their performing careers. The program is coordinated by Jimmy Cunningham, one of our own company dancers, who understands firsthand what it means to build a life around this artform.
Jimmy shared with us a recent op-ed in Dance Magazine which makes the case that dance organizations have an ethical responsibility to invest in their artists’ futures, not only their performances — to be, in the author’s words, a bridge rather than a precipice. That is precisely the spirit behind this program. Our dancers give us everything on that stage. The least we can do is help build a future that extends beyond it.
So when we say Grand Rapids Ballet is committed to artistic excellence and world-class dance, this is what we mean: extraordinary work on our stage, created by extraordinary artists, supported by an organization that sees them as whole people — not just for the length of a performance, but for the length of a career. That is the kind of company Michigan deserves. It’s the kind of company we intend to be.
Thank you for being part of our journey as we build the future of this art form we love, right here at Michigan’s home for professional ballet.
Gratefully,
Leah
