One of CORPS de Ballet International’s objectives is to serve and support the community of ballet educators who work in university and college settings. For 27 years, CORPS has done just that by fostering a sense of community through pedagogical exploration and academic discourse. In 2025, we expand the notion of community beyond the scope of traditional academe. We seek to rethink what it means to be a ballet community, examining how we cultivate community across and within a range of different spaces and places – real and virtual, professional and recreational, local and global.

As the 2025 conference dates overlap with the US federal holiday Juneteenth, a commemoration of the ending to the practice of slavery in the US, we seek to honor Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of the “beloved community.” Building on King’s discourse, bell hooks wrote: “Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.”

Ballet, when viewed broadly, incorporates numerous dialects, lineages, and legacies from an international population of dancers, choreographers, teachers, presenters, scholars, and beyond. In this year’s conference, we seek to mirror this wealth of knowledge and experience, connecting corporeal embodiment with rigorous academic investigation and exploration. We intend to explore the diverse ballet communities that exist locally, nationally, and globally and discover ways in which these communities diverge from and intersect with one another. Most importantly, this year’s conference aims to explore how our communities generate structures of care and support that further elevate and evolve ballet.