Company Profile
Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet
Company Overview
Complete Training
Central Pennsylvania Youth ballet (CPYB) is a ballet school that offers four divisions for dancers at different stages. The Children’s Division offers Creative Movement, Pre-Ballet and Tap, and the Primary Division provides opportunities to students six years of age and older. The Training Division is a 1-to-2-year training opportunity for committed students ages 12 through 19. These students are solely focused on fostering their technique and cultivating their skills as a student of ballet through CPYB’s distinctive syllabus. The Pre-Professional Division is for students with foundational knowledge ready for progression and training preparing them for the dance world.
Pre-professional ballet dancers need plenty of support and training as they work towards perfecting their technique. At CPYB, Training and Pre-Professional Division students receive 25 to 30 hours of classes, excluding rehearsal hours.
Company History
Executive Summary
Since 1955, Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet has paired world-class classical ballet training with a distinctly humane commitment to helping young dancers grow artistically, academically, and personally within a community shaped by discipline, care, and belonging.
Origins and enduring philosophy
Founded in 1955 by Marcia Dale Weary as the Marcia Dale School of Dance in Carlisle, CPYB grew from a local school into the nonprofit Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet in 1974, while keeping Weary’s child-centered but exacting vision at its core. CPYB’s own history pages identify Weary as the founder of the school. What is clearly specified is the school’s philosophy: CPYB says its mission is to inspire, educate, and enrich lives through classical ballet training and performance, while Weary herself emphasized helping children develop a love of the arts and classical music alongside self-discipline, generosity, and focus. That philosophy can be traced through the milestones that made CPYB nationally distinctive: the conversion of the red Barn into studios in 1957, the first full-length Nutcracker in 1965, the launch of the Dickinson College–associated summer program in 1976, the 1992 milestone of becoming the only school licensed to perform George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker®, the opening of the Warehouse Studios in 1999, the start of DiscoverDance in 2003, and the expansion to nine studios and its own theater in 2022.
Legacy: Train. Perform.Live.
CPYB’s reach is measurable, but its appeal for recruitment rests just as much in the culture of care surrounding that excellence. CPYB has trained more than 21,000 former students and more than 80 alumni currently hold positions in major companies; public company profiles help put familiar names to that legacy, including Ashley Bouder, Abi Stafford, and Alexa Maxwell at New York City Ballet, Jeffrey Cirio at Boston Ballet after earlier work with American Ballet Theatre, and Leta Biasucci at Pacific Northwest Ballet. At the same time, CPYB’s own alumni page stresses that former students also become teachers, medical professionals, authors, and other leaders beyond the stage, underscoring an educational philosophy that forms the whole person. That same whole-person approach is especially visible in residence life. CPYB publicly describes housing at Dickinson College as “an invaluable complement” to training, with on-site residence staff, two-person room assignments, daily meals with dietary accommodations, nursing and school-psychologist support, walkable access to classes, and planned activities that foster life-long friendships among students from across the country and around the world.
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