(upbeat music) - Ballet West educational programs are designed to educate teachers and students of all ages, and introduce them to the art of ballet and dance.

And here with more information is director of Education and Community Outreach, Peter Christie.

Hi, Peter.

A pleasure to have you on.

- Hi, Mary, it's great to see you again.

- So your program is quite massive.

I mean, you reach 141,000 students in Utah.

- Yeah, it's huge.

We're able to really kind of reach out to the entire state through our multiple targets of programming.

We have three different programs that we engage K-12 programming through.

Our first one, Ballet West For Children, we take an assembly into their schools and we expose them to their first look at ballet as an art form usually.

And so it's a 50-minute assembly that kind of covers a wide range of topics, from training to performance.

Then we also have a program called Ballet West In-Theatre Presentations, where we bring students into the theater to see a section of the ballets that we're performing as well.

And we fill the Capitol Theatre with that.

And we have a number of those, usually we do about 20 of those a year.

And then our last program is our I CAN DO program.

I CAN DO is an acronym for Inspiring Children About Not Dropping Out.

- Aw.

- So we use dance as an instructive tool to really teach life skills about training, trying something, making mistakes, learning from them, and then having a performance at the end of the year.

So it's really kind of an encompassing program that kind of really builds self-esteem and the willingness to learn new things.

- That is great, and I know you've probably got one of the largest programs for education in the world for ballet.

- It is quite large, yes.

I don't think there's anybody that's doing as many that we are doing, so yeah.

- Yeah.

And I know that you get state funding.

- We do, and part of the state funding is that we service the entire state of Utah.

So we go into all 41 districts throughout the state, and we work with the State Board of Education as oversight to make sure that everything's right on topnotch.

- All right, well, thank you so much for doing it, and thanks for being here.

- Thanks, Mary.

- And if you'd like to know more about Ballet West Education and Community Outreach Program, you can go to balletwest.org.

That's balletwest.org.

I'm Mary Dickson.

Thanks for watching "Contact."

(upbeat music) - Local events, arts, culture.

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Hi, I'm Mary Dickson.

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