In a town where the skyline is still dominated by a grain elevator, the sound of pointe shoes hitting marley floor echoes through a former hardware store on Main Street. Klemme, Iowa—population roughly 500—does not seem the sort of place where you'd find a working ballet company. Yet for more than two decades, Klemme City Ballet has been drawing students from across the north-central part of the state, turning farm kids into technicians and skeptics into season subscribers.
Built from Scratch
The company began in 2001, when founder and artistic director Maria Ellison returned to her home county after dancing with Kansas City Ballet's second company. She had left Klemme for conservatory training at 16, swearing she would never come back. Then her mother fell ill, and Ellison found herself home again, unemployed, in a town with no dance studio at all.
"I taught my first class in the Lutheran church basement," Ellison says. "There were six kids. Three of them wore socks because nobody owned ballet shoes."
Within three years, enrollment outgrew the basement. Ellison leased the vacant Klemme Hardware building, installed a proper sprung floor, and hung curtains on a track she built herself. That space, stripped of shelving and lit with theatrical gels, remains the company's home today.
Who Teaches Here
Ellison leads the advanced syllabus herself, with a focus on Vaganova technique. She is joined by two faculty members: rehearsal director James Okonkwo, a former dancer with Dayton Ballet who came to Klemme in 2014 after retiring from performance, and youth division head Theresa Voss, who trained at the University of Iowa and specializes in adapting ballet for students with physical disabilities.
Classes run six days a week, from creative movement for three-year-olds through a pre-professional track that meets 20 hours weekly. The student body is small—roughly 85 enrolled across all levels—but the geographic spread is wide. Families drive from Garner, Belmond, and Hampton, some covering 45 minutes each way.
On Stage in a Town Without a Theater
Klemme City Ballet produces two full programs annually in its own studio, which converts to a 90-seat black-box theater. There is no proscenium, no orchestra pit, no fly system. Dancers enter from behind a velvet curtain hung on a clothesline pulley. The audience sits in folding chairs arranged on the same sprung floor they rehearse on each day.
Last December, the company mounted The Nutcracker for the 18th consecutive year. Ellison stages it with a deliberate Iowa twist: the party scene includes a grandfather in Carhartt overalls, and the Snow Queen enters with flakes cut from actual folded paper by local 4-H clubs. The performance sold out all four showings, with attendees coming from four counties.
In spring 2024, the company premiered Fieldwork, a contemporary piece by guest choreographer Yuki Oba that set nine dancers against a projection of time-lapse soybean growth. The work was funded by a $12,000 grant from the Iowa Arts Council—Klemme City Ballet's third state award since 2018.
Where the Dancers Go
The company does not claim to feed dancers into major international companies. Its impact is more regional and more stubborn than that. In the past decade, Ellison estimates, roughly 30 students have gone on to pre-professional or collegiate dance programs, including at Butler University, the University of Oklahoma, and Milwaukee Ballet School.
One of them, 19-year-old Kaleb Henning, started in Ellison's church-basement class at age four. He is now a sophomore in the dance program at the University of Iowa and returns each summer to assist at Klemme's three-week intensive.
"I didn't know ballet was supposed to be rare here," Henning says. "It was just what we did on Tuesdays and Thursdays."
The Road Ahead
This fall, Klemme City Ballet will launch a pilot outreach program in neighboring Clarion, offering subsidized after-school classes in a borrowed elementary-school gym. Ellison hopes it will become a template for reaching other small towns without studio access.
The company will also remount Fieldwork in March, this time with live accompaniment from the North Iowa Symphony Orchestra—a first for KCB, and an ambitious pairing for any organization operating without a permanent stage.
For visitors, the studio doors are open. Observation weeks run in October and February. Performance tickets, when available, cost $15 and must typically be reserved weeks in advance.
