On a recent afternoon, Adrian Blake Mitchell was leading a boys-only class at the Westside School of Ballet in Santa Monica, Calif. In the center of the studio, 11 students in matching white T-shirts, black tights and white ballet slippers went through a series of plies and foot positions as Mitchell moved from student to student, adjusting and correcting. Where’s the arm? Keep the knees straight.
As at most ballet schools, the vast majority of Westside’s students are girls. When Mitchell, now 32, was a young ballet student here 17 years ago, he was the lone boy in class. “I kept my ballet a secret for a long time,” he said.
When Mitchell returned to the school in 2022, this time to teach, there were four boys. But in a few short years Mitchell expanded those numbers tenfold, to 40. All four in the original group went on to top ballet schools, professional ballet companies — or both. One, Spencer Collins, was selected to share the title role of Billy Elliot in the British national tour of “Billy Elliot the Musical,” which opens on Nov. 4.
Melissa Barak, the artistic director of Los Angeles Ballet, said, “He’s really keen on teaching proper technique and making sure they’re able to execute certain things before they advance on to the next level.” She added, “He holds his students to a very high standard.”
Mitchell’s success as a ballet instructor and recruiter is all the more startling because he hasn’t been doing it long. Just four years ago he was a professional ballet dancer in Russia, performing with the Mikhailovsky Ballet in St. Petersburg.
A longtime acolyte of the Vaganova method, a classical ballet technique developed in St. Petersburg by the Russian dancer Agrippina Vaganova, Mitchell was drawn back to California at least in part to try his hand at teaching Balanchine technique, a vastly different style. Created by George Balanchine, the founding choreographer of New York City Ballet, it’s a method of training, emphasizing speed and athleticism, that Westside has long embraced.
He also wanted to get more boys into the school. Celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, Westside boasts a number of famous female alumni, including Tiler Peck, a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet; and Joy Womack, the first American woman to sign a contract with the Bolshoi Ballet.
But there have been far fewer boys. Given the high attrition rate of ballet students, both girls and boys, Mitchell knew he had to attract as many boys as possible just to keep a relative handful. “Ballet’s hard and it just gets harder,” he said.
In his boys-only classes, he said: “We learn about looking in someone’s eyes when we speak. We learn strong handshakes. When the girls are there, the boys have to move the barres. I’m teaching a lot of things I wish most adult men had.”
Janie Taylor, artistic director of the Trudl Zipper Dance Institute at the Colburn School across town, understands the challenges of recruiting students in Los Angeles. Ballet doesn’t have the deepest roots in the city, she noted, the way it does in Europe and New York, and the places to see ballet are often spread far and wide across the city’s sprawl.
The secret of Mitchell’s recruiting success: “I am shame free,” he said. “Every little brother in that lobby who comes with his sister, I ask to take classes.”
For boys in ballet, that’s a time-honored route. Balanchine was invited to study ballet when he accompanied his sister to an audition at the Royal Theater School in St. Petersburg. (His sister was not admitted.) The actor Jamie Bell, who played Billy Elliot in the 2000 film, began studying ballet after accompanying his older sister to her classes.
Mitchell was born in Coppell, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. His mother was a women’s basketball coach, and sports were a big part of the family. Mitchell tried basketball, then baseball, then gymnastics, but nothing stuck. “I had a lot of energy and physicality, but I wasn’t competitive at all,” he said.
A viewing of “The Nutcracker” when he was 9 changed all that. He began taking ballet classes when his family moved to California. He eventually landed at Malibu High, but even in that relatively open-minded environment, he was bullied for liking ballet. “You were not the cool kid if you did it,” he said.
When he came to Westside, where he trained in Balanchine technique, he was pushed to apply himself by teachers who saw his talent. After two years, those same teachers encouraged him to leave Los Angeles. At 15, he went to the Houston Ballet Academy, and then to Ellison Ballet in New York City.
Mitchell was invited to perform in Russia, where he was noticed by one of the directors of the Vaganova Academy, the alma mater of Nijinsky, Pavlova, Baryshnikov, Nureyev and Balanchine. The director invited him to attend the school.
Mitchell knew it was the opportunity of a lifetime. “I had to go,” he said. But he also knew Vaganova’s reputation as one of the most mentally and physically punishing ballet schools in the world, a reputation immortalized in documentaries like “Ballerina” and “Dance of the Little Swans” and older films made in the Soviet era. “We weren’t getting hit per se,” he said. “But the training was very harsh.”
In 2015, Mitchell joined the Mikhailovsky Ballet in St. Petersburg. “When you say you’re a ballet dancer in Russia, it’s like saying you play for the Lakers,” he said. “It’s a huge honor.”
The place was steeped in tradition — for good and ill. “Russian ballet still has blackface,” he said, “so you would see someone next to you painted black.” Mitchell found himself cast in roles traditionally danced in blackface.
“I definitely was typecast,” he said. “I was the Arabian prince in ‘Cinderella.’ I was the High Brahmin in ‘La Bayadère.’ They never had someone who looked like me there, so they thought, put him in.”
He and another principal dancer in the company, Andrea Lassakova, now his wife, had created successful careers for themselves in Russia, but were restless. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, they knew they had to go.
“It would have been difficult to be there as if nothing was going on, and essentially endorsing it by being there,” he said. “My Russian friends didn’t have a choice to leave. It wasn’t like people were handing out visas to Russians.”
In 2023, he returned to Los Angeles and soon began teaching at his old ballet school. Spencer Collins, then 9, had just joined the school. “I wouldn’t say we were necessarily treated better than the girls,” Collins said, “but because there were so few of us, we were able to get more individual attention.”
That first year, Mitchell took his four boys to the Youth America Grand Prix, an international dance and scholarship competition popularly known as the “American Idol” of ballet. It was a first for the school, and all four made it to the finals.
“I think people were wondering why we were doing it,” Mitchell said. “Competition isn’t really in our DNA.”
“It’s a school that takes anybody who wants to do ballet,” Collins added.
Even so, the success of those first four has been notable. Two went on to professional ballet companies: Dylan Weinstein to the Dutch National Ballet and Sawyer Jordan to the San Francisco Ballet. Evan Hull is in the Royal Ballet School in London.
And then there’s Collins, the lone American in a group of British Billys.
“Spencer works really hard, and he absolutely loves ballet,” Mitchell said. “I’ve seen other kids that are very talented, but ones that really respect and love this art form, that’s rare.”
The role is a major coup for any dancer, but the full scope of it is lost on some of Collins’s Los Angeles pals. “One of my friends from back home texted me a couple of months ago and said, ‘hey, did you know Tom Holland was Billy Elliot forever ago?’” he said. “‘You could be the next Spider-Man!’”
Back at Westside, the search for students continues. One way the school competes for boys, whether of Collins’s caliber or not, is by offering free tuition to boys ages 3-10. (Many ballet academies waive tuition for boys.)
“I think one day it won’t be this way,” Mitchell said. “But it has to feel competitive with, say, club soccer, right? So if one of them is free, maybe that helps us a little bit.”
Taylor believes there’s been a slow but steady growth of interest in ballet in Los Angeles, which can only help recruitment. More big companies have been coming to perform there, she said, including Dance Theater of Harlem and New York City Ballet; last September, Los Angeles Ballet made its first appearance at the famed Hollywood Bowl. “There’s a lot more coming into theaters here that I’m really excited to bring my kids to see,” Taylor said, speaking of her students.
Mitchell also believes that seeing great ballet is key to getting children interested in the art form, even if they don’t become the next Spencer Collins.
“We’ve got hundreds of kids at Westside, and not all of them are going to become dancers,” he said.
“But if we can affect them positively, they can go out and affect the world positively,” he continued. “I know maybe it’s not real or realistic, but I think we’re actually changing the world.”
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