This URL was a contact page. It is now the page that explains what this site is, which is the honest substitution, because the one thing this site deliberately does not have is a way to contact anybody.
What this site is
It is an independent archive of a regional ballet company that operated in Erie, Pennsylvania from the mid-1950s: its Nutcracker, its academy, its repertoire, its collaborators and the way it was organised and funded. It is written as a reference work, in the past tense, by people with no connection to the organisation it documents.
What this site is not
It is not the official site of any ballet organisation. This archive is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or operated by Lake Erie Ballet Company, the organisation presenting ballet in Erie today. That is a separate and independent body with its own governance and its own website, and it has no involvement in this site whatsoever.
If you are looking for tickets, classes, auditions, casting, rehearsal times or anything else that concerns a live organisation, you are in the wrong place and this archive cannot help. Go to lakeerieballetcompany.org, which is the current organisation’s own site.
It sells nothing and collects nothing. There are no tickets, no enrolment, no donations, no membership, no mailing list, no forms and no accounts. There is no telephone number, no postal address and no email address anywhere on this site, and that is deliberate rather than an oversight.
It is not a current source of anything. Every page describes activity that ended years ago. Nothing here is a schedule, an offer, an availability or an invitation.
The editorial rules
Six rules govern every page.
1. No minors, ever. No child’s name, photograph, casting, class placement or audition result appears anywhere on this site. The original site named children; this one does not, and the pages where they appeared are not reproduced.
2. Private individuals are described by role, not by name. Teaching staff, student and early-career dancers, orchestra players and volunteers are not named and their personal biographies are not republished. Those biographies were written by their own organisation, about its own people, while they worked there. Reproducing them indefinitely on an unaffiliated site would extend their identity onto something they never agreed to and cannot correct.
3. Founders, directors and public artistic figures are named. Where an appointment or a piece of work was a public fact about a public-facing arts organisation — a founder, an artistic director, a choreographer, a conductor, a guest artist — the name is part of the subject matter and is recorded. Nothing is added to what the record showed: no new biography, no awards, no credentials.
4. Where the record disagrees, both versions are given. The founding date is the clearest case: company literature claimed 1948, other material in the same archive gives 1956, and the current organisation dates its lineage to 1957. This site records all three and settles none of them. The founder’s first name is spelled two different ways in the source material, and that is noted too.
5. Nothing is invented about third parties. Other organisations, venues, universities, companies and funders are described only as the record describes them. No current relationship, licence, partnership or endorsement is claimed on anyone’s behalf.
6. No contact surface is restored. Every legacy page that was a way to transact — ticket sales, the online store, class registration, tuition payment, volunteer signup, programme advertising, contact forms — is redirected to a relevant reference page and is not rebuilt. The studio street address and telephone number that appeared on every page of the original site do not appear anywhere on this one.
Sources and their limits
The archive is reconstructed from public web archives of the organisation’s own former website across three distinct eras of that site, from 2005 to about 2020, together with publicly documented information about the wider regional arts sector.
The limits are real and worth stating. Coverage is uneven: some pages survive in full, many survive not at all. The last version of the organisation’s site was database-driven, so the final years are the thinnest. Almost everything here originates with the organisation writing about itself, which is a promotional register, and season announcements in particular record intentions rather than events. No photographs of the company are held or published; the illustrations on this site are newly made and depict no identifiable person or real event.
Corrections
Because there is no contact channel, corrections cannot be submitted here, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. Anyone who holds primary material about this company — programme books, photographs, runs of the house magazine, production files — is far better served offering it to a county historical society, a university special collection or a state library, where it will be catalogued, preserved and made available properly. That is a genuinely useful thing to do and this site is not a substitute for it.
Start at the front page, or with the history.