Berkeley City Ballet

My 5 year old just finished a 1 week ballet camp at the BCB, and I can’t rave enough about how nice the whole experience was for me and for my daughter. She loved the dancing, the atmosphere was relaxed and sweet, and the final recital was the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. They did nice crafts, and she even came home with photographs and a ballet slipper. Totally awesome all around.

Update: My daughter is still in attendance at 14 years. Her passion is strong and so is she. Berkeley City Ballet continues to help me raise my child to be confident and exceptional.

We celebrated my daughter’s 6 th bday @ BCB, the girls had a fabulous time. As a mom that has given many parties, I highly recommend it! The mini performance wast the highlight and the cutest thing!!! Thanks again BCB!!!

As a former dancer and physical therapist I highly recommend Berkeley City Ballet as an excellent school for young dancers & aspiring professionals.
My 16 y.o. daughter has studied at BCB since she was 7. She has performed in BCB’s professional level Nutcracker each year, advancing from «Ginger Snap» to the «Snow Queen» dancing the pas de deux with a professional partner.
The director & staff at BCB take great care to progress each student only when they are physically ready and strong enough to be safe and successful. This is especially important in deciding when to go on pointe or when to advance the dancer to the next level.
Berkeley City Ballet’s rigorous, artistic & conscientious training has prepared my daughter to successfully attend the summer programs with the Boston Ballet and LInes Ballet. For high school, she is an advanced dancer at San Francisco School of the Arts (SOTA).
I feel very lucky to have such an outstanding ballet school right here in Berkeley. With this strong foundation I feel my daughter can safely go as far as she chooses in the field of dance.

My daughter has been attending classes at BCB since she was 4 ½ (9 years). We looked carefully at a couple of schools before choosing BCB. We couldn’t be more pleased with the training and grounding she has received at BCB. The school is strict and provides exceptional foundational training in classical ballet. They have recently expanded to offer modern dance as well, but the core dance foundation is still ballet. The teaching is balanced. There is a focus on being healthy and strong and thus foster healthy weight and body image. I highly recommend BCB.

It seems like eternity since Grace Doty left BCB more than five or six years ago. She was a great force and a great teacher at BCB, and the school has continued to offer great instruction since her departure. To say that there hasn’t been any kink in the transition would be a lie as her departure was sudden and catastrophic at the time, but the Artistic Director Elizabeth Godfrey has managed to keep the school in tact and has kept it moving forward.
My daughter has been with BCB since she was six, and now she’s a senior at BHS. She has been accepted into one of the very few college-​level classical ballet programs in the country. While giving all the support needed to fulfill her dreams to become a professional ballet dancer, Elizabeth is also there to remind my daughter about the realities of professional dancers: short, hard, and poor. As a parent, I really appreciated this.
The Nutcracker is BCB’s main event of the year, and students look forward to performing in it every year. While the students strive to give their best in the performance, there is no «me first» competitiveness. The director emphasizes team work and cooperation, which is critical to any performance. BCB also emphasizes self-​sufficiency, discipline, and responsibility. From an early on, the kids are taught to do their own hair into a bun, put on their own stage make-​up, and sew elastic and ribbons onto their shoes. I witnessed a parent sewing ribbons and elastic on pointe shoes at one of the college auditions, and it reminded me that I don’t even know how to do that after all these years!

Berkeley City Ballet used to offer world-​class professional ballet training and put on excellent performances using mostly their own students. My daughter, who is now a professional dancer, still encounters people who compliment her dancing and remark on Grace Doty’s reputation for turning out unusually graceful dancers, with better use of the upper body and head than some much more famous schools. However, now the level of teaching there is so low that they have to hire mediocre «professionals» to fill the roles in Nutcracker, even after «dumbing down» all the choreography. They used to place one or two students a year in professional ballet companies, an amazing number for such a small school and such a competitive field, but in the last 7 years, they haven’t trained one that was able to dance well enough to get in to a company. This is an ok place if your little girl wants to play ballerina (though the artistic director can be really bitchy to both kids and parents), but if you have a child whose passion is to dance professionally, don’t waste your money or their time on Berkeley City Ballet. Or any of the other options in Berkeley/​Oakland. Go over to San Francisco – SF Ballet if your child has the right body type and won’t be devastated is s/he’s kicked out a couple years down the road; if your child doesn’t have a perfect ballet body try The Academy of Ballet. Or try The Ballet Studio, which still doesn’t have enough studentsl in the more advanced levels and doesn’t have much in the way of performing opportunities. You could also try Contra Costa Ballet in Walnut Creek. Or Marin Ballet, which is the closest thing we’ve found to the «old» Berkeley City Ballet — it has excellent training, generally a nice friendly feeling, well-​trained and nurturing teachers, and wonderful performing opportunities. Their physical setting, purpose-​built for a ballet school, is also wonderful and spacious, with an in-​school theater, a ballet library/​video study room, multiple studios, nice dressing rooms, a garden, and pleasant parent waiting area.