YAVAPAI COUNTY has several dance studios with trained instructors, committed students and families who have invested seriously in the art form for years. What it hasn’t had is a production nonprofit where the only job is to build a full theatrical ballet season on top of that foundation. That’s Yavapai Ballet Theatre.
YBT founder and Artistic director Emily Tylecote is building her company on partnerships with existing studios across the county. Her vision is to offer full-length ballet productions that give dancers a high-quality community stage where they can bring their best and contribute to performances that have nothing to do with competition or individual scoring.
The model is collaborative by design, a structure in which YBT supports participating studios through master classes, workshops and choreography resources. Those studios in turn contribute dancers who want to commit to a full production season, and together they mount something that would be impossible to create alone.
Emily’s relationship with ballet has been a journey, and what it has meant to her life informs her entire approach to building YBT. She describes finding it young, around six years old. “We all find the brush that paints our lives,” she said. “For me, it was ballet, a place where my mind can meditate on the complexity of a simple function.”
This experiential perspective informs her thoughts on the competition circuit, an increasingly dominant force for young dancers. “What is most engaging is, how many pirouettes can a dancer do? How high can they jump? How far is their over split? And so it becomes more like watching the circus.”
Storytelling, which is what ballet has been for most of its history, is harder to adjudicate. Emily sees the tension in her students. “Without context," she said, "you can’t develop the real artistry.”
“Ballet is a different language,” she continues, “but it’s still the language of emotion. Any tiny movement, can transform the entirety of what you’re saying and transport the audience with you. The minute dancers start to feel that, something changes. They start dancing like artists.”
Emily approaches everything the way she describes her learning style: digging deep, looking at a topic from every possible angle. It’s an instinct she carries from her undergraduate years at Yale, where she danced with the Yale Ballet Company and wrote on international affairs, through years of international development work spanning multiple countries and continents, to building a ballet-production nonprofit in Prescott. Though unrelated on the surface, the commitment to understanding something fully before deciding how to build it is the same.
For Emily that means being honest about where YBT’s first full-length production starts. The dancers have trained seriously, most of them for years, but performing a full two-hour theatrical production is something most haven’t done. The company's inaugural production of The Nutcracker will likely land somewhere on the continuum between community theatre and professional performance.
She’s decided that’s not just acceptable, it’s appropriate. “It's more important to me that we are fostering growth within our community,” she says, “aiming up, teaching what’s important, showing audiences what we’re committed to, and allowing that growth to happen over time.”
Growth isn’t possible without opportunity, which is why access is a core part of the YBT mission. Ballet is expensive to train in. Class hours, private lessons, hundreds of dollars on pointe shoes that last about a month, master classes that compound on top of regular tuition. The costs get steeper as dancers get older and the training demands increase. Families make hard calls. Kids stop.
YBT charges a single, affordable, annual registration fee of $140 and nothing beyond that. Dancers are offered every bit of available financial aid, and that extends beyond the registration fee to class costs, equipment and anything else a student needs to meet their YBT commitments. The Adopt a Dancer fund exists specifically to assist students for whom the financial barrier would otherwise close the door entirely.
Emily is clear that the program is still developing. She doesn’t know yet how many families will need it in the first year, or how far current resources will stretch. But she’s committed to naming it at the outset, because it signals something about what this organization is actually for. “It's to demonstrate that professionalism lives here, that inspiration lives here, and that our kids are more than capable of inhabiting that space on stage with all the support of the community behind them, a community that really wants to give to the next generation.”
She describes her own role with a word she seems to mean precisely: ‘midwife.’ “I haven't met many artistic directors who don’t have a large ego,” she said, “but I like to think I’m really just the midwife for these productions.” The work requires choreographic vision, design input, studio relationships and community partnerships she can’t supply alone and doesn’t try to. It is, as she describes it, “a kaleidoscope of different visions brought together as one.”
There's real ballet talent in this county, and strong teaching behind it. What’s been missing is a stage that asks for total commitment and rewards that commitment by placing it squarely inside a dramatic storytelling experience. That's the gap Emily is working to close with each production. “The minute you actually respect them and bring them into that art form,” she says, speaking of dancers and audiences alike, “when you don’t water it down, you would be absolutely surprised how much they understand and how much it changes them.”
Dancer auditions for the YBT season are May 14 and 16. Actor audition dates will be announced via ybtheatre.org and @ybtheatre on Instagram and Facebook.
