Thirty thousand euros for young top talents

The concentration is enormous, the mastery great. The boys and girls standing here dancing can do something. The apparent ease with which these 12-year-olds demonstrate their dance moves shows at the same time how difficult ballet is. After all, the movements have to be performed perfectly, and splashily. Moreover, of this group, only a few will make it to the world's top: the Dutch National Ballet. Students at the National Ballet Academy in Amsterdam choose one of the most difficult school careers there is: training for ballet every day, and doing the vwo in the meantime. They do so at the preparatory school, which starts in grade seven and eight of primary school, and then, via secondary school, ends up at the HBO programme at the Amsterdam School of the Arts.

Preparatory education at the Olympiaschool (primary education) and Gerrit van der Veen College (secondary education) in Amsterdam Zuid requires small classes and a lot of time for training. Stadsdeel Zuid considers it of great importance that this excellent form of education remains possible and has therefore made €30,000 structurally available. Offering tailor-made education for talented pupils fits within the district council's vision of high-quality and differentiated education. After all, according to central government standards, classes must be larger than is good for such an exclusive ballet school. With the extra money, classes can now remain small.

How necessary is such training really? Jet de Ranitz, chairman of the Executive Board of the Amsterdam School of the Arts: "It is a profession for which you have to start training in time. With drama or painting you can start later, but for ballet and music you have to be good at a very young age, otherwise you will never learn the technique." The budding young ballet dancers are well aware of this. Their lives are different from their peers right from the start. Students Rosa and Stijn agree: "Playing football or riding horses is out of the question because we cannot get injured, so we do other things in our free time." If there is any free time at all, because the double schedule of both school and daily training sessions does not leave much room for anything other than dance.

Ultimately, the training is also hard: only the best get through, and every year students have to audition again to determine who gets through to the next year. Then it can just happen that you have to stop training after a few years. And even then: the Dutch National Ballet can choose from the best ballet dancers in the world for its ensemble, because almost everyone wants to dance with this company. So in the end, only a few places are up for grabs, and only a few of the dancers showing their first steps this afternoon will remain.

But the students who cross the finishing line and graduate from the HBO programme at the National Ballet Academy can dance at the very highest level. They go on to work for major Dutch dance companies such as the Dutch National Ballet, Scapino Ballet Rotterdam or Introdans, or for companies of a similar calibre abroad.