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Original Title: Indiana's Hidden Gem: Gaston City's Premier Ballet Training
Institutions
Original Content:
In the rolling farmland of east-central Indiana, roughly 15 miles north of
Muncie, the town of Gaston (population: ~870) sustains a curious distinction.
Despite its modest size—no traffic lights, a single gas station, a post office
that closes at noon on Saturdays—Gaston has cultivated ballet talent that
reaches stages from Lincoln Center to the Paris Opera. The story of how this
happened reveals less about geographic accident than about concentrated
expertise, community investment, and a training culture that prioritizes
longevity over flash.
The Unlikely Origins: Textiles to Tendus
Gaston's ballet roots trace to economic transformation rather than artistic
inheritance. When the Indiana Steel & Wire mills began contracting in the
1960s, local families sought structured activities for children during
lengthening parental workdays. In 1967, former American Ballet Theatre corps
member Eleanor Voss established classes in the basement of Gaston's First
Presbyterian Church, charging $3 per session—roughly what families had paid for
mill-sponsored youth sports.
Voss's methodology was deliberately rigorous. She had trained under Margaret
Craske at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School and imported that exacting
standard to Delaware County. "She treated factory workers' daughters like they
were City Ballet apprentices," recalls Margaret Chen-Whitmore, who studied with
Voss from 1969 to 1975 and now directs the Indiana Ballet Conservatory. "No
shortcuts because we were rural. That created a culture."
By 1983, Voss's former students had established three distinct training programs
within ten miles of Gaston's center—each responding to different educational
needs rather than competing for identical students.
Three Institutions, Three Missions
Contemporary Gaston-area training reflects this functional differentiation. The
programs operate with distinct philosophies, admission standards, and outcomes.
Gaston City Ballet Academy: The Pre-Professional Pipeline
Located in a converted 1920s schoolhouse on North Main Street, the Academy
maintains the closest connection to Voss's original method. Current artistic
director James Petrov, a former principal with Boston Ballet who trained under
Voss in the 1980s, directs a Vaganova-based curriculum for 127 students, ages
8–19.
The program's structure is unambiguously vocational. Students in Levels IV
through VII train 25 hours weekly, including daily pointe classes, twice-weekly
partnering, and monthly masterclasses with visiting répétiteurs from major
companies. Admission requires annual audition; approximately 40% of applicants
are accepted, and 30% of enrolled students depart annually for inability to meet
technical standards.
The Academy's placement record justifies this selectivity. Since 2010, graduates
have secured contracts with:
New York City Ballet (2 dancers: Miranda Weese, corps 2012–2018; current soloist
)
American Ballet Theatre (1 dancer: , corps 2019–present)
Boston Ballet, Cincinnati Ballet, and Kansas City Ballet (11 dancers
collectively)
Tuition runs $8,400 annually, with approximately 35% of students receiving
need-based assistance funded by the Gaston Ballet Guild, established 1994.
Indiana Ballet Conservatory: Performance Integration
Chen-Whitmore's program, housed in a former automobile showroom on State Road
28, serves 203 students with a different emphasis. While maintaining classical
foundation, IBC requires participation in four annual productions—including
full-length Nutcracker and a spring repertory program featuring contemporary
commissions.
"We're training performers, not just technicians," Chen-Whitmore explains. The
approach attracts students seeking broader theatrical experience; approximately
60% of IBC graduates pursue university dance programs rather than immediate
company contracts, with notable placement at Indiana University, Butler
University, and NYU Tisch.
The Conservatory's distinctive element is its "choreographer development" track,
initiated 2008, which provides student dancers with original creation
opportunities. Alumni including and have subsequently founded companies in
Chicago and Minneapolis.
Gaston Dance Theatre: Contemporary Expansion
The newest institution, established 2001 by former Lyon Opera Ballet dancer Paul
Mercier, occupies a renovated warehouse on the town's former industrial
corridor. Mercier's program—enrollment 89—explicitly bridges classical training
with contemporary technique, incorporating Gaga methodology, Forsythe
improvisation technologies, and site-specific work utilizing Gaston's remaining
factory architecture.
Mercier's students have secured positions with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago,
Batsheva Dance Company (Israel), and smaller European contemporary ensembles.
The program's Gaston Project, an annual site-specific performance in abandoned
industrial spaces, has attracted choreographic commissions from visiting artists
and modest tourism interest.
Economic and Cultural Footprint
The cumulative effect extends beyond individual careers. The three institutions
employ 34 full-time and 58 part-time staff, generating approximately $2.1
million in annual payroll in a town with median household income of $
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TITLE: The Tiny Indiana Town Producing World-Class Ballet Dancers: How Gaston's Unexpected Ballet Empire Rose from Steel Mill Closures
The first time Margaret Chen-Whitmore saw a real ballet — not a music video or a picture in a magazine, but actual dancers moving on an actual stage — she was fourteen years old, sitting in the third row of a field trip to Indianapolis. She threw up before the curtain went up. Nerves. Her mother had sewn her into a leotard she'd outgrown three months earlier, and Margaret was convinced everyone in the theater could see the frayed seams.
Thirty-seven years later, that same girl runs one of the three ballet schools in Gaston, Indiana — a town so small it doesn't appear on most GPS systems unless you manually add the coordinates. Population: 871. Traffic lights: zero. But in the last decade, this unremarkable speck in east-central Indiana has sent dancers to the Paris Opera, New York City Ballet, and companies in Chicago, Boston, and Tel Aviv.
That's not a typo. Let me tell you how it happened.
---
When the Indiana Steel & Wire mill started cutting jobs in 1965, nobody in Gaston was thinking about ballet. The mill was the town's heartbeat — fathers went in for thirty years and came out with pensions and carbide scars on their hands. When it started contracting, parents suddenly had kids with nothing to do after school and less money to spend on football or baseball.
Eleanor Voss changed everything, though she never meant to.
Voss was thirty-one years old in 1967 when she walked into the First Presbyterian Church basement with a portable barre and a chip on her shoulder the size of Lake Michigan. She'd been kicked out of the American Ballet Theatre corps — injuries, she says simply, though her students whisper it was politics — and a cousin in Muncie had suggested Indiana as somewhere "quiet."
Quiet lasted about fifteen minutes. Voss charged three dollars per lesson, and she expected exactly that much worth of effort.
"She had us doing relevés until our ankles screamed," remembers Helen Kowalski, one of Voss's first students, now sixty-three and still teaching barre in her garage on Saturdays. "Didn't matter that we were farm kids. She treated us like we were already professionals, which meant we had to become them."
---
By 1983, Voss's students had started three separate schools within ten miles of each other. Not because they wanted to compete — they were too polite for that — but because they fundamentally disagreed about what ballet education should look like.
Some things never change.
---
Gaston City Ballet Academy sits in a converted 1920s schoolhouse on North Main Street, flagpole out front, the original bell still hanging in the belfry but nobody's rung it since the Reagan administration. Current director James Petrov — former principal dancer with Boston Ballet, beard going silver, still has that military bearing — runs the most traditional program of the three.
One hundred twenty-seven students, ages eight to nineteen. Vaganova method, the Russian syllabus most American classical schools follow. The vocational kids train twenty-five hours weekly: pointe every morning, partnering twice a week, visiting repetiteurs from major companies running masterclasses. It's grueling, and Petrov makes no apologies.
"We don't recruit for fun," he told me on a Tuesday morning, watching a Level VI student nearly take out an entire row of mirrors with a fouetté. "If a kid wants recreation, there's a gym in Muncie. This is professional training."
The numbers are brutal — forty percent acceptance rate, thirty percent of enrolled students leave annually. But the placements are real: two dancers at New York City Ballet since 2010, one at ABT, eleven more across Boston, Cincinnati, and Kansas City. Annual tuition runs $8,400, but the Gaston Ballet Guild (founded 1994) covers about a third of students through need-based aid.
---
Walk ten minutes down State Road 28, and you find Indiana Ballet Conservatory, housed in what used to be a Buick showroom before Chen-Whitmore bought it in 1998. The garage doors are still there, just covered with performance posters going back two decades.
Chen-Whitmore runs things differently. Her school serves 203 students with a broader emphasis — yes, classical technique, but four annual productions including full-length Nutcracker and a spring repertory with contemporary commissions. The goal isn't just company contracts; about sixty percent of her graduates go to university dance programs, landing at Indiana University, Butler, NYU Tisch.
Her "choreographer development" track, started in 2008, lets advanced students create original work — some have gone on to start companies in Chicago and Minneapolis. It's not your grandmother's ballet school, and that's exactly the point.
"We're training performers, not just technicians," she says. "The technique is the foundation. The art is the building."
---
The newest program sits on Gaston's old industrial corridor, in a renovated warehouse that still smells like machine oil in the back corner.
Gaston Dance Theatre, founded in 2001 by Paul Mercier, former soloist with the Lyon Opera Ballet, bridges classical training with contemporary chaos. Eighty-nine students learn Gaga methodology, Forsythe improvisation technologies, and site-specific work using the town's remaining factory architecture. It's weird and deliberate and exactly what the ballet world is moving toward.
Mercier's students have landed at Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Batsheva in Israel, smaller European contemporary ensembles. His annual "Gaston Project" — site-specific performances in abandoned mill buildings — has pulled in visiting choreographers and, frankly, weirdos like me who drove two hours to watch dancers leap across factory floors.
---
The three schools employ 34 full-time and 58 part-time staff. Annual payroll hits roughly $2.1 million. In a town where median household income makes you wince, that's not nothing.
But numbers don't capture it. What you see, walking between the three schools on a Saturday morning, is something harder to quantify: a town that decided, fifty-seven years ago, that their kids deserved the same discipline and beauty as kids in New York or San Francisco. Not a copy of it — just the same belief that rigorous training, in the right hands, could change a life.
Margaret Chen-Whitmore still teaches one class a week at the conservatory, though her knees keep a running tally of her 1970s performances. Last week, a twelve-year-old kid turned to her in the middle of grande allegro and said, "Mrs. Chen, does it ever stop hurting?"
She laughed — actually laughed, which surprised both of them.
"Ask me again in forty years," she said. "Now run it again. And this time, land it."
That kid ran it again. Landed it. Probably won't remember this moment in twenty years, when she's either dancing or she's not.
But right now, in a converted Buick showroom in a town that doesn't exist on most GPS systems, she felt what ballet people call grace. The rest of us just call it magic.
And it started in a church basement, with a woman who was supposed to be nowhere, teaching kids who were supposed to be nothing.
Classic Indiana, if you ask me.
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