Save Stockton Ballet School

Stockton Ballet School (SBS), the longest continuously running dance studio in Stockton has been open since 1933 (90 years!) and is now in danger of closing. Owner Ms. Elaine Orimo (who has owned the school for 33 years) has shaped dancers of all ages for decades, but her studio was deeply affected by the Covid pandemic. Ms. Elaine has tried her best to remain afloat for the last few years, but enrollment is way below pre-pandemic levels. SBS is behind on rent, and is burdened with Covid upgrade related costs, and Ms. Elaine is facing the heartbreaking decision of closing her beloved business.

If you’ve danced at SBS, you know that Ms. Elaine provides excellent dance instruction with small classes and 1:1 attention that is rare nowadays. She genuinely cares about all of her students, as evidenced by the photos of past and current dancer photos that line the school’s walls. SBS is an absolute Stockton treasure, as is Ms. Elaine, and she needs our help.

Please donate if you can, and if you’re unable, please share this fundraiser and tell everyone you know about the ballet, jazz, tap and Pilates classes at Stockton Ballet School. Let’s help Ms. Elaine get caught up on her rent, and be in a position to return SBS to the thriving, quality dance school it was pre-pandemic.

For more about Ms. Elaine, please read below for a story that originally appeared on the Instagram page, Humans of Stockton:

Ms. Elaine knew she was going to be a dancer when she was 7 years old. There were not a lot of dance studios in Murphys, where she grew up, so she took lessons from a teacher from Stockton who drove to Murphys and offered ballet classes in the local firehouse! She recalls that if the ballet students were well behaved during lessons they could go upstairs, but she never got to go down the fire pole. Later her family moved to Stockton, where she continued her dance studies. She went on to study dance at the University of Utah, returned to Stockton, and eventually took over Stockton Ballet School.

Ms. Elaine’s love of dance is apparent as soon as you start speaking with her. She says that dance “takes you away from everything that is happening outside the door and you are there with your body and your mind and there is nothing that can come into that. Your body and your mind are together and you are trying to coordinate with music and space and it’s all encompassing. And then that kind of focus helps when you have to do other things. The things you learn in the dance class are . . . life skills and you learn them not only in a visual and aural sense, but also in your body.”

Ms. Elaine is equally passionate about teaching dance. She hopes to help her students immerse themselves totally in what they are doing in the classroom. She says, “You may not be a professional dancer, but you will always be a professional audience member, so you will appreciate dance, you will have all the skills you learned, plus the appreciation of what the other person’s effort is. The discipline of dance. The visuals of dance. The art of dance. ”

For Ms. Elaine, dance is art! She says, “especially in these times everybody needs some release from the drudgery of the day. And I think art, in whatever form, is going to take you away from stress in your life. Art gives you appreciation for something beautiful, it gives you a smile, and just maybe a spark of creativity!”