Infinite Threads
Ballet
Curriculum for young dancers, the ballets, the Labs, and pointe shoe fitting.
Ballet trains perception before it trains steps. That is the part I care about, and it is the part most easily lost.
A dancer learns to feel where her weight actually is, rather than where she assumes it is. She learns the difference between a correction she has understood and one she is imitating. She learns that a phrase can be executed accurately and still be empty.
Most training teaches the shape and hopes the perception follows. I work the other way around — build the perception, and the shape arrives with something inside it.
We honor the shape.
We are here for the thread.
The Curriculum
Embodied Threads
A presence-based ballet curriculum — where technique is the container, and the thread is the child.
In ballet, technique is often treated as the summit: clean lines, turned-out legs, precise execution. Embodied Threads honors all of that — the shape matters, and we teach it carefully. But technique alone is a container. We are here for what the container holds.
The thread is presence: the living pulse of a dancer's inner world, expressed through breath, sensation and story. It is what moves a child from performer to artist, from student to self. Alignment and articulation are taught alongside something rarer — the ability to feel the body from the inside, and to move from awareness rather than for approval.
Ages 3–7 · Before It Begins
Storybook Ballet
A story read aloud, then moved. Improv, imagination and play — where nothing is supplied and everything has to be made up.
Early Years
Ballet Foundations I
First shapes, story and rhythm — the body discovering that movement can speak.
Middle Years
Ballet Foundations II
Building the container: alignment, musicality, and the beginnings of expressive phrasing.
Ages 11–12
Ballet Foundations III
Artistic phrasing and more complex flow — technique becoming a language of its own.
Ages 12–15
Intermediate Flow Ballet
Integration of technique with musical artistry — character, emotional phrasing, mindful strength.
Ages 12+
Advanced Flow Technique
Personal interpretation and somatic refinement — the dancer moving from awareness, a living expression of consciousness in motion.
Classes are taught at Artistic Dance Conservatory. Placement is based on readiness, not rigid age categories — and every level holds space for the teacher's voice and the student's own expression.
Going Deeper
The Ballet Labs
For the dancer ready to go further than a class allows.
Focused laboratories where one element of technique is taken apart and rebuilt from the inside. Not more repetition — closer attention: the turn, the balance, the adagio studied as an embodied question rather than a step to survive.
Each lab pairs precise technical work with the interoceptive practice at the heart of Embodied Threads — for dancers who want their technique to come from awareness. Dancers who do not just execute the shape, but inhabit it.
Each Season
The ballets
The curriculum culminates in a ballet — some adapted from beloved stories, some entirely original, all rooted in developmental storytelling and seasonal mythology.
The children do not simply perform a show.
They spend a season living inside a myth,
and then they give it a body.
The Magical Divide — an original story that became a ballet, and then a book. First staged in 2018, it began as a tale written for young dancers and grew into a published picture book, illustrated by Melissa Lettis.
It is the clearest example of how these ballets work: story first, then movement, then something the children carry with them long after the curtain.
The Magical Divide → · The Little Sun Who Forgot How To Shine →
Original ballets — myths written for young dancers, so the pattern a child lives inside for a season is one made for exactly where they are.
Adapted for the stage — beloved tales re-choreographed for young dancers, retold through developmental storytelling and seasonal mythology.
Pointe Shoe Fitting
The shoe meets a particular foot
A pointe shoe is equipment that has to agree with one specific body. Not a category of foot. That one.
Most bad fittings come from the same mistake: a general description gets treated as more authoritative than the living thing in front of you. The dancer is fitted to the model instead of the model being found for the dancer — and then she spends a year believing her feet are the problem.
I do not sell shoes. I come with you to the fitting — which means my only job is making sure the pair you leave with is the right one.
Foot structure, arch and ankle mobility, toe length pattern, and how weight actually travels — observed standing, rising, and on the shoe.
Strength and readiness, honestly. If a dancer is not ready for pointe, I will say so — and say what would make her ready.
Box shape, vamp, shank strength and profile matched to what that foot does, not to what is popular this year.
Padding, ribbons, elastics, and how to sew them for this foot.
How to tell, three weeks in, whether the shoe is right — and what to change if it is not.
By Appointment
Fitting & Assessment
Fancy Feet · Ludlow, MA
or a shop of your choosing
One hour plus travel · $55
Free in studio for Artistic Dance students
Bring your current shoes if you have them, and your dancer's teacher's name if there is one — a fitting works better when it is not happening in isolation from the training.
Email to Book a Fitting →Studios and teachers wanting a group fitting, or a readiness assessment for a whole class — write to me here.
For Grown-Ups Too
Not only for children
The same body work — the interoceptive, presence-based practice beneath the ballet — is for adults as well.
What the children learn as dancing, the grown body learns as return: feeling movement from the inside, moving from awareness rather than for approval. It is one practice, met at every age.
Every child arrives already moving.
We teach them that their movement means something.