About

Welcome to Balletclass.com! I’m Xander Parish, Principal Dancer of the Mariinsky Ballet, and I’m very happy to welcome you to my platform.

My aim here is to curate and present to you top quality ballet training materials, performed and taught by the world’s leading dancers themselves for you to learn from and train with, or to simply watch and enjoy!

I want this platform to be utilised and enjoyed not only by ballet dancers of all levels but also by ballet lovers who want a rare behind the scenes view into the training and focus that goes into making our craft one of the most beautiful art forms in the world and also by ballet beginners and anyone who loves fitness and would like to try our classes as a means of attaining the ballet body look!

As I myself know, every dancer who has made it to professional level has had to overcome their own personal limitations, whether physical or mental, to achieve success. They have had to train relentlessly and through persistence they have found their personal routine for success. What’s fascinating for me as I work with new dancers week by week to bring their personal classes onto the site is seeing how even though the determination in each dancer is so similar, the routines and exercises they choose to do vary greatly!

Special thanks is due to several individuals whose efforts have made balletclass.com possible. Firstly, thanks is due to Andrej Uspenski (@dancersdiary), my friend and former Royal Ballet colleague whose special talents as a director & videographer have been instrumental in preparing the materials for the platform; my website designer and developer, Alex Peters of www.theslabstudio.co.uk who has done fantastic work to bring this vision to life; also Emma Kauldhar of Dance Europe www.danceeurope.net for supporting this idea from the outset and helping with many of the UK based shoots; and to Boris Zhurilov, First Soloist of the Stanislavsky Ballet, for supporting and organising many of the Russia based shoots.

Please explore the site and send in your comments. We would love to know what you think of balletclass.com– what’s good, what’s interesting, what’s not good and what you would like to see done differently? Also let us know who would you like to see featured next!

Thank you for reading this introduction and thank you for choosing Balletclass.com!