A ballet company is a group of dancers who perform classical ballet, neoclassical ballet, and/or contemporary ballet in the European tradition, plus managerial and support staff. Most major ballet companies employ dancers on a year-round basis, except in the United States, where contracts for part of the year (typically thirty or forty weeks) are the norm. A company generally has a home theatre where it stages the majority of its performances, but many companies also tour in their home country or internationally.
Ballet companies routinely make a loss at the box office, and depend on external financial support of one kind or another. In Europe most of this support comes in the form of government subsidies, though private donations are usually solicited as well. In North America private donations are the main source of external funding.
Many ballet companies have an associated school which trains dancers. Traditionally the school would provide almost all of the company's dancers, something which helped to create clear distinctions in style between companies, but 21st century ballet has open hiring practices, and many ballet companies have a very international staff.
Read more about Ballet Company: Staff, Asian Classical Ballet Traditions, Africa, Asia, Caribbean, Europe, Middle East, Oceania, North America, South America
Famous quotes containing the words ballet and/or company:
“Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“Yet, hermit and stoic as he was, he was really fond of sympathy, and threw himself heartily and childlike into the company of young people whom he loved, and whom he delighted to entertain, as he only could, with the varied and endless anecdotes of his experiences by field and river: and he was always ready to lead a huckleberry-party or a search for chestnuts and grapes.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)