This page documents how a regional ballet academy staffed itself: which posts existed, what each one carried, and what kind of background the people holding them tended to bring. It does not reproduce individual teaching biographies. That is a deliberate editorial decision and the reasoning is set out at the end.
The posts
A company of this size carried four or five distinct artistic posts, and the titles overlapped in ways that look confusing until you understand what each one is actually responsible for.
Artistic Director. Responsible for the company’s repertoire, casting, choreographic commissioning and the standard of what reaches the stage. In practice at this scale the artistic director also choreographs, teaches the top levels and rehearses the company personally.
Ballet Director. Where a company carries this post separately, it usually means the artistic director is a choreographer and the ballet director is the guardian of classical technique — the person who keeps the vocabulary clean across the whole school. The two posts held together by different people is a sign of a company taking its syllabus seriously.
School Director. Runs the academy as an institution: levels, placements, term structure, assessment, faculty, timetable, fees policy. This is an administrative post with an artistic veto, and it is the one that determines whether a school has a coherent curriculum or a collection of classes.
Children’s Division Director. Responsible for the youngest students, where the pedagogy is genuinely different in kind rather than in degree. A person who is excellent with sixteen-year-olds may be no good at all with four-year-olds, and vice versa.
Arts in Education Coordinator. Runs the outreach strand — residencies in schools, lecture demonstrations, work in medical and community settings. Because this post is usually funded by grants rather than by tuition, the person holding it spends much of their time writing applications.
Principal Instructor and Artistic Advisor. Senior teaching posts, often held by former directors who have stepped back from running the organisation but continue to teach and to advise. This is how institutional memory is retained in a field with high director turnover.
In Erie’s case, several of these posts were held in combination, and the same individuals appear under multiple titles across the record. That is the norm at this scale: five posts, three people.
The lineages
What the surviving faculty record shows most clearly is where regional academy teachers come from. The documented directors and principal instructors of this academy had trained or danced with a recognisable set of institutions: the Joffrey Ballet School and Joffrey II, Boston Ballet and Boston Ballet II, the Dallas Metropolitan Ballet, the Berkshire Ballet, Ballet Theater of Pennsylvania, the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, the Australian Ballet School, Milwaukee Ballet, and the dance programme at Mercyhurst University in Erie itself.
This is the ordinary career shape in American ballet and it is worth stating plainly, because it is invisible from outside. A dancer trains at a conservatory, dances for eight to fifteen years in a mixture of companies, and then teaches. The teaching is not a fallback; it is the second half of the career, and it is where the technique gets transmitted. A small city’s academy staffed by people with that history is connected, through its teachers, to a national training tradition — which is precisely why a child in Erie could be taught to a standard that would be recognised in Pittsburgh or Philadelphia.
What faculty were teaching to
The academy’s syllabus, set out in detail on the academy page, gave faculty a fixed framework: two divisions, three terms, end-of-term testing, published dress standards and a director-granted advancement decision. Teaching inside a framework of that kind is a different job from teaching a private class. The instructor writes progress reports, holds an observation session for parents, prepares students for an assessment they do not themselves adjudicate, and hands the advancement decision upward.
Faculty also worked alongside a rotating cast of resident guest artists, who ran workshops every eight to ten weeks. That means the regular staff were regularly teaching in a building where somebody from outside was also teaching — an arrangement that keeps a faculty honest and is one of the healthier features of the model.
Why this page names no one
The archived faculty pages carried full personal biographies: training history, performance credits, family details. One of them named a staff member’s spouse and five children. Elsewhere in the record, individual instructor pages existed for seven named teachers, and a company roster gave the personal training histories of seven early-career dancers, most of them undergraduates at the time.
Those pages were written by the organisation about its own staff, for its own website, while everyone concerned worked there. This site is not that organisation and has no connection to it. Reproducing private individuals’ personal histories on an unaffiliated site, indefinitely, extends their identity onto something they never agreed to and cannot correct. The children named on the original page were minors and are covered by an absolute rule: no minor appears anywhere in this archive.
The line drawn here is between people as subjects of a public record and people as private individuals. Founders, artistic directors, choreographers, conductors and guest artists are named on other pages of this archive, because their appointments and their work were public facts about the organisation and are the subject matter. Teachers’ family lives, students’ training histories and children’s names are not, and are not restored.
Readers researching individual teaching careers should approach the institutions those teachers worked for. The state arts agencies hold roster-artist records of the kind several faculty here held, and are the appropriate route.