The NBS week audition experience…from mom and dancer

It’s been a week and a half since the Toronto/National Ballet School adventure, and a lot has been happening over here….we’ve made it to the other side of another successful Mardi Gras season that was possibly the best yet. Fantastic celebrations and always fun seeing so many friends, and it’s also a good day when the weather works in our favor! But we’ve also had time to process the NBS audition week experience and hear back on next steps.

There isn’t much online for parents to read regarding what happens at the audition week at NBS, should your dancer be invited to attend, so my goal here is to share our personal experience and also help others decide if it’s worth the trip should they be invited. In my last post, I ended with super basic details on the drop-off process, but since then, we’ve done a full download on the highs and lows of the experience.

On drop-off day, Stella was assigned a dorm room with two other dancers in her current grade (she is a freshman/9th grade/aka ‘grade 9’ in Canada), and these dorm rooms are typically shared by two dancers during the year, but there is a top bunk bed that is set up for visiting students. I am going to assume NBS uses the same housing setup for winter exchange students who visit while year-round students are also living in the dorms. The packing details we received when she was offered the invitation to attend this final audition week said to ‘pack light,’ and they weren’t joking. There was zero space for a visiting student to store their belongings, and it’s also hard to pack super light in the winter when you need coat/scarf/sweaters/accessories. Luckily, I utilized one of our packing cubes that converts to a hanging clothes organizer, so I managed to hang it from the front of one of the two boarding students’ closets. I also had packed one folded flat cube bin that is really for inside a sock drawer. I told Stella to keep it in her bunk to store any little items and to then stuff her dirty clothes from each day back into her suitcase we parked in the hall by her door. She’s not really a minimalist, but this was a good lesson in trying to live like one. NBS does assign each student a locker in the dance facility during the week, so she was able to keep some things there from her dance bag, like her foam roller and pointe shoe bag. My first impression of her specific dorm floor was that it was a little dirty, and I thought maybe it was the end of the week, and the cleaning crew came at the beginning. But by the end of the week, the perception was the same level of cleanliness. Maybe it was an off week, IDK, but I would have thought the dorm would be spotless with guests coming for the week?

On the first day, she received her schedule and met with the other dancers from the various grades also attending the audition week. They received a tour of the campus and then attended their daily class schedule. Technically, she was auditioning for Grade 10, but you are placed in with the grade you are currently in….so she spent the week with the Grade 9 students. Grade 9 and below attend their dance classes before lunch, and Grade 10 and up attend academic classes before lunch. Then, they swap schedules. She had a daily technique class and then one other dance class that varied. This week, it was a rotation of pointe, Afro fusion, variations/rep, and conditioning. She thought it was odd that for technique class, the dancers wear demi-pointe shoes or an old pair of really dead pointe shoes they have modified to work like demi pointes. There was no problem with her wearing flat tech shoes since this wasn’t a specific request to bring. The technique class was also taught by the same teacher every day, and they also learned a set combination at the beginning of the week, which they worked on all week. Not her favorite structure to a class as she likes the challenge of learning new pieces to work that part of the brain, but it was good for a week's experience.

After lunch, the week was filled with different seminars that exposed the auditioning students to bits of the academic days at NBS, like taking life skills and arts history classes. The students also had scheduled independent work hours, which was great for Stella to keep up with her Veritas class work, so she didn’t come back to too much make-up work for online assignments. There was also an afternoon when the residence life staff organized a field trip to the CN Tower. The students rode the subway/train system with chaperones and were able to shop for souvenirs at the stores near the station. In the winter, this was probably the best taste of Toronto experience and see some amazing views above the city. There was an opportunity to get a pointe shoe fitting at The Shoe Room, which is attached to NBS, but she’s a Freed girl and didn’t have a desire to fit for another brand.

Students do not get a chance to go back to the dorms during the day, so they pack everything they need in the morning before walking over to the dance and academics buildings. Stella didn’t love this because right now she’s used to getting a minute to decompress in between academics and ballet. Even when she was back in Lafayette at her home studio, she still had a chance to take a breath in her personal space to switch her brain between the two modes. It made the days feel really long. She’s also been fortunate to attend summer intensives where the studio and the dorms are attached, so I guess this was just a feeling neither of us ever thought about. As a parent, it was nice for me to know that there wasn’t a lot of back and forth, but I can understand that feeling of needing to relax and recharge, especially since they did not return to the dorms until 5 pm, I think?

She made some new friends with the other girls there for the audition week and said that the year-round students were nice as well. She was the only auditioning student in her grade attending that week, so in a way, that was hard in class because everyone in her class already had a spot secured; it was easy to fall into the mind trap of, ‘everyone here is so much better than me.’ Auditions aren’t always just about getting an acceptance or a rejection….they can also be about getting personal feedback needed to grow as an artist, so being able to recognize this feeling and what needs to be sorted out internally is good to know!

I am very grateful that NBS has an optional service for chaperoning students to the airport. I was on the fence whether I should stay all week to fly her home or utilize this service, but I’m very glad we did this. It was super affordable and an excellent opportunity for Stella to learn how to travel independently. Air Canada flies direct to Houston, so she was able to take the last non-stop flight back on Friday. At 15, it is not required to pay for the unaccompanied minor program, so instead, I put her in business class to make sure she would be at the front of the plane, have a meal, and be comfortable on the way home. It was also helpful to have internet access to work on school assignments! No issues getting back, but she did tell me, ‘they decided to pressure wash the plane before we left. I guess it was dirty?’ I was not going to tell her then, but that was not for cleaning, rather to de-ice the plane. Again, things Southern people don’t think about because why would we?!

The communication is really great for families before the audition week about the process, but there wasn’t a lot of clarity about what happens after the audition. I did find it odd that we didn’t receive anything at the end of the day on Friday or even Saturday, especially since we utilized the chaperone service. I guess they figured we would reach out if our child didn’t make it home?! I do know that there are typically only scheduled interviews after the audition if your child is being considered for acceptance, so I equated this to a ‘thanks, but no thanks.’ In the meantime, I could tell Stella seemed a little irritated coming home, and I wasn’t sure if it was that she missed the program or that she was upset or what was going on. After some talking, it turns out that she was mostly upset because she loved everything about the program EXCEPT the ballet classes. This is very important information to have when you are considering a school specifically for the ballet classes ;) We had a good laugh at that! She wanted to love it so much more, but said there was just something she didn’t love and that if she were to get an offer, we would have to ask very specific questions about how future-year classes were structured. Again, good feedback and information are needed in order to make decisions. I don’t know how much truth there is to the expression, “All you need is one YES!” because what if you get a yes to a program that isn’t the right fit for you?

I am not the mother to harass programs about when we will hear something, mostly because programs typically give you a timeframe to receive correspondence, but I did email almost a week after to at least ask if we would receive communication that our dancer was not a candidate for acceptance so we could shift our conversations to looking for other programs that might be a better fit. I did hear back that information was going out regarding either decision to families at the end of the week. When the correspondence did come, we were informed that she was not a fit for NBS’s program at this time, and that they do see something special in her, and that this was not an indicator that she would not be successful on her path towards professionalism. Honestly, this was great news, because we already knew she knew it was not the fit for her, and there was no temptation to make herself fit a round hole as a square peg.

So, was this audition week a ‘waste of time and money’ to take away from other opportunities? NO! I’ve already mentioned the experiences that she was able to walk away with, and I’m a firm believer that all these little things are what will shape her best in the long run. Whatever program she ends up in as her next-steps professional training level is going to feel like the highest and best fit for her. It was great to be able to attend a program longer than one 90-minute audition to decide if you liked the program, AND that you didn’t have to commit your whole summer intensive away trying to get into a program that you then find out you don’t love. I wish more programs offered these kinds of audition experiences for their year-round program!