Ballet Club Recital 2026: An Evening on the Court Street Stage
On June 15, 2026, Ballet Club brought seven young dancers to the stage of the City of Nashua's Court Street Theater for our first full recital — a joyful, community-rooted celebration of a season of hard work, growth, and discovery. We are deeply grateful to the City of Nashua for welcoming our dancers into this beautiful historic venue and giving them the kind of stage experience that so many children in our program never imagined they'd have.
Ballet Club was founded by Natalia Price and Natalia Markelova, two lifelong lovers of ballet and artistic expression, who volunteer their time to bring free classical dance instruction to children in our community. Every week, we meet on Mondays at the Gloria Timmons Community Center, where we teach ballet completely free of charge to kids ages 6 to 9 — removing cost as a barrier so that any child with a love of movement can experience the discipline, beauty, and joy of dance.
The heart of our June recital was a piece choreographed to the Clog Dance from the classical ballet La Fille Mal Gardée— a piece full of energy, precision, and pure delight in movement. For our dancers, most of them just six to nine years old (including one especially talented five-year-old boy who more than kept pace with the group), this was about far more than steps. It was about feeling the joy of moving to music, discovering aesthetic expression, and — for a few unforgettable minutes — being the center of attention. Standing on that stage, each of them got to physically feel their own agency: that they could take up space, be seen, and be celebrated for it.
What made this season especially remarkable is that the children didn't just perform choreography we gave them — they created some of their own. Three original dances came directly from the kids' imaginations. One, which they titled "Ballerina and Clowns," tells the story of a ballerina whose dance is playfully disrupted by clowns, before everyone reunites and dances together in peace, joined by two more ballerinas. The other two pieces are pure expression without a storyline, set to Gonzaga's Gaucho (Tango) and the Dance of the Cock and Hens from La Fille Mal Gardée, Act 1. Building these dances taught the children collaboration, leadership, and communication — skills that will serve them well beyond the ballet studio.
This recital was the culmination of a season that began early in 2026 with weekly Monday classes at Gloria Timmons Community Center. As the performance date approached, we took rehearsals outdoors to Greeley Park, practicing our stage choreography in the open air. During spring vacation, we also ran a focused three-day intensive dedicated to core ballet technique — chassé, glissade, and pas de bourrée — giving the dancers a stronger technical foundation to build on.
None of this would be possible without the families behind these dancers. We want to especially thank the parents, who so often carry far more of the load than anyone sees — the driving, the rehearsing at home, the costumes, the encouragement on hard days. This program exists because of your support as much as ours.
Ballet Club is currently volunteer-run, and we are in the process of establishing ourselves as a nonprofit so that we can grow this program and seek the sponsorship that will let us reach even more children in Nashua. If this story moved you, we'd love to hear from you: Do you have a child who moves every time they hear music? Do you love dance and want to volunteer teaching or helping expand our program? Or is there some other way you'd like to support what we're building? Reach out through our Contact page — we'd love to talk.
📷 Photography by Natalia Price Photography
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