A new ballet company is betting that plenty of adults who hung up their pointe shoes years ago still have the technique, the drive, and the heartbreak of unfinished business. The Ballet Salon, founded in 2025 by former pre-professional dancers Meiying Thai and Adriana Gramly, is built specifically for dancers who walked away from ballet but never stopped wanting to perform it at a high level.
The company describes itself as a semi-professional contemporary ballet company designed for dancers returning to ballet, according to Meiying Thai's website. It aims to give returning dancers a joyful and supportive pathway back to the stage while also backing professional choreographers with funding, resources, and dancers to work with. As reported by The New York Times, the Ballet Salon provides a place for serious former ballet students to practice and perform without pursuing professional careers — a space Thai herself said she wished existed when she quit.
Thai, who trained as a student at the School of American Ballet, told the Times she lacked options to continue a life filled with dance after she quit, and that she lacked an entry point back into ballet once she was ready to return. The Ballet Salon's debut performance is scheduled for October 19 and 20, per the company's own announcement, and the Times reports the company will make its formal debut at the Gibney Theater at the Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center as part of a two-night engagement in New York City.
A Nonprofit Backbone for a New Kind of Company
Behind the scenes, the Ballet Salon operates as a sponsored artist of The Performance Zone Inc., doing business as The Field, a not-for-profit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization that serves the performing arts community, according to the company's site. That fiscal sponsorship structure is common for small arts groups trying to get off the ground without the overhead of forming their own nonprofit.
The Times notes that ballet classes have long been available for children, while ballet marketing has traditionally centered on performance and professionalization has long been viewed as the field's top priority. Adult beginner ballet classes, by contrast, have only grown in popularity more recently — and the Ballet Salon's pitch leans directly into that gap, targeting dancers who already have serious technique but no clear place to use it.
Adult Ballet Classes Are Filling Up Nationwide
The Ballet Salon isn't emerging in a vacuum. At the Washington Ballet, adult classes routinely reach full capacity at 25 students on weeknights and weekends, per Pointe magazine. The company has responded by reworking its adult program to add several new levels, including sessions for absolute beginners. Pointe's reporting describes 2023 as a huge year for adult ballet students of all levels, with classes surging in cities from Los Angeles to New York and Washington, D.C.
Ballet teacher and YouTube personality Kathryn Morgan told the outlet that half her audience were adult ballet dancers — a sign of just how large and engaged this population has become even outside the studio. That demand isn't confined to professional companies, either; it's showing up in university physical education departments too.
Universities Are Seeing the Same Demand
Thea van Warmerdam Patterson, a former ballet dancer who now works as a full-time lecturer in the University of California, Berkeley's Physical Education Program, was hired to reintroduce ballet to the curriculum in 2023, according to her own account published via Taylor & Francis Online. She has since developed a nonmajor ballet program there, defining a nonmajor as any adult student seeking ballet education for reasons beyond pursuing a professional dance career.
Patterson's Berkeley population includes a range of nonmajor students, from absolute beginners to dancers returning to ballet after a hiatus, and she has described serving a growing population of students coming from all corners of campus. Still, she notes that nonmajor ballet courses are often offered at inopportune times, sometimes as early as 7:30 a.m., a scheduling constraint tied to limited time and studio space on campus.
What It Costs to Get Back on Pointe
For dancers who want structured adult classes outside a university setting, American Ballet Theatre offers both in-person and virtual options for dancers ages 18 and older, according to ABT's own program page. In-person classes run $27 each or $125 for a five-class pack, and the company recently introduced a Fall 2026 semester pass covering all in-studio classes through December 18 for $500.
Not every data point points the same direction, though. The National Endowment for the Arts has reported that attendance rates declined compared with 2017 for virtually every type of arts activity it tracked, including ballet and other dance forms, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. Whether that broader dip in attendance coexists with a narrower surge in adult participation specifically is something the available data doesn't resolve — but it hasn't stopped the Ballet Salon from betting its debut weekend on dancers who want back in.
