My first pair of pointe shoes didn't come from a shop in New York or Chicago. They were ordered online, sized by my mom with a measuring tape in our kitchen in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. When they arrived, I didn't have a pristine studio with a sprung floor to break them in. I used the back of our barn, the rough wood floor dotted with old hay, holding onto a crossbeam for balance. That’s what serious ballet looks like when you live 60 miles from the nearest graded class.
People hear "world-class ballet training" and picture Lincoln Center or the grand studios of San Francisco. They don't picture the Mississippi River bluffs, the smell of dairy farms in the spring, or the reality of mapping your week around a 90-minute car ride to La Crosse. Growing up here, the path to a professional stage isn’t a clear, paved road. It’s a scavenger hunt you piece together yourself.
My foundation was a patchwork. Tuesday afternoons, a retired ballerina from Milwaukee who’d moved to our town for the quiet would host a small group in her sun-flooded living room, correcting our plies while her cat wound around our ankles. Thursdays, my mom would drive me to Viroqua for a real studio class with other kids. I learned frappés not to the sound of a grand piano, but to a CD skipping in a community center. The school play gave me stage time; the track team gave me stamina. You learn to stitch your training together from whatever threads you can find.
And here’s the secret no one tells you: those limitations become your superpower. In a big-city pre-pro class, you’re one of thirty. My teacher in Viroqua knew my knees were hyperextended before I did, and she built my strength slowly, carefully. There was no rushing to the next level because a paying parent demanded it. I had to become my own coach, too. I’d watch videos of Marianela Nuñez in our farmhouse, then practice port de bras in my bedroom, negotiating for space between the bed and the dresser. That self-reliance, that hunger, is something you can’t buy.
The summer before I turned sixteen, I scraped together money from babysitting and my dad’s odd jobs to attend a four-week intensive in Chicago. The first day, the teacher asked where I trained. "Prairie du Chien," I said. A few kids smirked. They’d been at year-round conservatories since they were eight. But by the third week, after I’d nailed a tricky petit allegro combination I’d drilled for hours back home, she pulled me aside. "You don’t dance like you’re from a small town," she said. "You dance like you’re starving for it." That’s the rural dancer’s edge. We’re not fed the art; we hunt it down.
Now, I’m preparing to audition for university BFA programs. The fight isn’t over. The math is still brutally honest—thousands apply for a handful of spots, and my training was a mosaic, not a monolith. But I look at the dancers from my town who came before me: one is with a contemporary company in Milwaukee, another coaches and runs a festival in Madison. We didn’t take the highway. We took the backroads, and we learned to navigate every single turn by heart.
So, when someone asks if you can become a dancer from a place like Prairie du Chien, I think of my scuffed shoes on the barn floor. The distance doesn’t have to be a desert. For some of us, it’s the forge. The stage lights might be 180 miles away, but they’ve never felt closer than they do now, after dancing toward them with everything I had, every single day, from right here.
