- I think everybody's experience with ballet is always different, but our hope is always that individuals leave inspired and challenged to think about their community and their own world slightly differently.

(upbeat music) I'm Nick Mullikin, I'm the artistic director and CEO of the Nashville Ballet.

I think ballet's seen as elitist, and I think that that's a huge stigma that we work to sort of try and dismantle during the course of our work, which is to create accessible options for individuals.

We have a digital series, we provided "The Nutcracker" free on television for the last four years, and we also offer the opportunity, as we said, to our community engagement programs for people to understand the art form and through those podcasts, really give an inside look inside of what it is that ballet is and how it can be a part of your everyday life.

I think that Nashville Ballet doesn't try and uphold the standards of what classical ballet is.

One of my favorite things about Nashville Ballet is that there is no typical staging, but our work does range from fully classical ballet, up through a sort of neoclassical "Nutcracker," to the most contemporary work that you can find.

We have classes for young students to do ballet from age two to seven, and those are your foundational classes that help to really create imagination, they allow students to dream about what movement can be.

And then from ages eight and up, they have the opportunity to take ballet class seriously, but we also have jazz, we also have contemporary class, that gives students the chance to explore different styles of movement.

And then at age 18 and up, we offer our community division classes that allow adults to come in and do their own ballet class.

We also have a fitness class called Dance Fix, which allows students to learn choreography while also getting in shape.

And then also our contemporary classes, so adult students have the chance to get a wide array of repertoire of classes as well.

Our aspiration is to continue to use classical ballet as an on-ramp for people to know the stories and to see who we are, but then to recognize that the company isn't exactly like every other company in the United States, and that the experience we create here, the stories that we tell, the opportunities that individuals have to engage with our art form, are specifically and uniquely Nashville.

Ballet can be seen as one singular thing, and it's truly not, it's a versatile language for just about everybody to enjoy.

- [Announcer] This NBT Arts Break is made possible by the generous support of the Martha Rivers Ingram Advised Fund of the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee, and a grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission.