One of my favorite visitors…….

This Spring at ABT I’ve had the pleasure of working as the Summer Intensives intern in the Education Department, helping prepare for the exciting summer season where young dancers travel far & wide to learn from ABT’s amazing faculty at their various intensives. ABT’s educational programs are all so incredible & prestigious, all helping to train the future dancers of America. Working in the office alongside the people who make that magic happen has been such a rewarding experience, and has solidified how excited I am to work in arts education in the future.

Although I am pretty confident in the path I plan to pursue, one of my favorite aspects of my ABT internship was our weekly intern meetings on Friday. We got to meet so many people with different relationships to ABT; former dancers, board members, employees, intern alums & more! It was so exciting to meet these different people & hear their ABT stories, and learn about different aspects of the arts from them.

One of my favorite visitors was ABT’s Associate Company Manager, Ashley K. Baer. The company management team takes care of all the administrative needs of the dancers; contracts, comp tickets, benefits, travel & lodging logistics, etc. I loved hearing Ashley’s stories from the road about what it was like on tour with the company and having such a huge responsibility taking care of well over 100 people who aren’t just traveling for fun, but are there to put on a show and make incredible art each night! Ashley spoke a lot about how the ABT dancers are treated like celebrities abroad, and how appreciated dancers are in other cultures, which is something I found so interesting in comparison to America. I really didn’t know a lot about company management before meeting with Ashley, but I absolutely loved getting to hear about this exciting job, and learning about this different area of life at ABT. All of our intern meetings gave us important glimpses into different areas of arts administration, and although I love education, I feel so lucky to have interned at a company that gave us a well rounded experience & helped us learn so much.

Meeting Ashley was so informative & inspiring that if I wasn’t terrified of planes, I’d definitely be wrapping my head around pursuing company management! Luckily, my experience at ABT working alongside my wonderful mentors has helped me learn so much about arts education & I could not be more excited to pursue it in the future after this incredible semester at ABT comes to a close.

Meg Haase

Summer Intensives Intern

Spring 2016