OUR STORY
Returning home to the world of ballet
The Ballet Salon is a semi-professional contemporary ballet company designed for dancers returning to ballet in search of artistic expression, joyful community, and the inspiration that comes from collective movement. The Ballet Salon was founded in 2025 by Meiying Thai and Adriana Gramly, two ballet dancers-turned visual artists who connected through a shared passion for dance, art, and community building.
We see the act of returning to ballet as a return to oneself. To return to dance is to return to both a first love and a first language. The Ballet Salon will be a place for all of us to come home to dancing with a shared and supportive community. With the Ballet Salon, we also hope to challenge the belief that a dancer’s career span must end when her true adult life perhaps, is only just beginning. We are interested in dancers with rich life experiences, and even dancers who have overcome obstacles in order to return to ballet. We hope to challenge the limitations and stigma that are often felt by “former” dancers– you may have taken time away from the barre, but we truly believe you never stopped being an artist.
A LITTLE ABOUT US
From Ballet,
to Visual Arts,
and back to Ballet
We met, by fate, at the barre in an open ballet class in Brooklyn: Adriana, a lover of graceful lines and slow adagios, Meiying, a jumper with a quick petite-allegro and a passion for waltzing. We soon discovered that we are both visual artists with backgrounds in community building. Bonded by our similar career paths, we soon became friends, and then later, colleagues. For both of us, ballet was much more than a childhood activity, it had been a professional practice, an artistic calling, and a home away from home we both dreamed of returning to.
