(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) - Ballet is beautiful.

It's all of the beautiful things in life.

Everyone is in the theater, they're sitting there, they're feeling it.

You're all sharing that beautiful moment.

Visually, beautiful.

The sound, beautiful.

Beauty.

(chuckles) (gentle music) - Central Illinois Ballet is the only professional ballet company in Peoria.

It's a special place.

It's a small community of artists who are just here to spread the joy of dance and storytelling to the people in our community.

Cornerstone Academy is our training school, whereas Central Illinois Ballet is the professional company.

- Our professional dancers help with our academy, and almost all, except for one of our performances during the year, involves not only our professionals, but our academy as well.

- You can dance here at any age, starting at two years old is the youngest, and then I believe our oldest dancer is 78.

We offer a little bit of everything, starting at ballet, which is what we put forward.

That's our thing.

But it's also extremely important for young dancers to learn other styles, such as jazz, and that goes into contemporary, where it really starts to loosen up, modern, where you're starting to loosen up, but learn how to control, like, truly from within, your muscles and all of that.

And then going into hip hop, which is just having a good time breaking it down.

(gentle music) - My portion of what I'm kind of in charge of is our professional company, which is Central Illinois Ballet.

We right now consist, if you count me, 11 professional dancers from all over the states.

So every morning we go in and take class, and then every afternoon we have rehearsal with each other, with myself, and then we get to perform at least five times a year.

- These dancers are from all over the place.

We have people from Utah, Pennsylvania, I'm not the only one, Michigan, Texas, Florida.

All of these people from like around the US that are coming together and being able to create something.

And then everyone has such a positive attitude.

They all love what they're doing.

- We get paid for it, that our job.

It's like anybody else's nine to five.

It's like, you know, when you're five and you say, "Mom, I wanna be a ballerina."

It's like you never lost that.

You get to keep that with you, and you get to walk into the studio every day and pull out the shiny pink satin shoes and pull on your little tutu, and be like, "I get to be a ballerina every single day as my nine to five."

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) - [Dyson] It's not just how amazing of a ballerina are you.

You learn discipline.

There's so much knowledge that comes with it that's going to feed you into any career that you go into truthfully.

So we're just trying to create really talented, humble, and hardworking kids.

- [Jessie] What we're doing here is taking amazing professionals from all over the country.

We have our wonderful little troop, and we are allowing this community to be able to come to our amazing professional shows.

And we're making it accessible for literally anyone in the community.

- We really just wanna reach out more to the central Illinois and greater Peoria areas.

We have so much to share with everyone, and we have dancers that are working so hard that you want everyone, like, I wish everyone in the world could come to our shows and just see our dancers, and see what they have to put out there.

- It's fun, it's magical, it's stressful, it's nerve wracking, but it's freeing all at the same time.

Just knowing that there's people out there who have been sucked into this story, who have been sucked into this piece, and are looking at it for the beauty that it is.

It's really inspiring.

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