Please join us in welcoming the San Francisco Ballet School Trainees!

Since its establishment in 2004, the San Francisco Ballet School Trainee Program boasts a 100% rate of dancers who are engaged by professional ballet companies, including San Francisco Ballet. Designed to ease dancers’ transition from the studio classroom to the professional stage, the one-to-two year pre-professional program offers free tuition and housing to Trainees, who are chosen each year from the School’s advanced students by School Director Patrick Armand and SF Ballet Artistic Director and Principal Choreographer Helgi Tomasson.  

In addition to their own rigorous training schedule with SF Ballet School faculty, Trainees also participate in rehearsals with the Company and are invited to perform in corps de ballet roles in full-length SF Ballet productions such as Giselle and The Sleeping Beauty. Trainees maintain a robust performance schedule elsewhere throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and on tour worldwide; the students have performed in venues such as the New National Theatre in Tokyo, Palais Garnier in Paris, The David H. Koch Theater in New York, and with San Francisco Ballet at The Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., City Center in New York, and the Shanghai Grand Theatre and Suzhou Grand Theatre in China. Former dancers from this program have gone on to join some of the most celebrated companies in the world.  Many have been asked to join the San Francisco Ballet Company while others have joined the ranks of prestigious companies such as The Joffrey Ballet, Boston Ballet, Mariinsky Ballet, National Ballet of Canada, English National Ballet, Royal Swedish Ballet, and Royal Danish Ballet.

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