Leaders International

About the Opportunity

ID: 26-1722 Location: Calgary or Edmonton

Every city that is taken seriously in the world is taken seriously for its culture. Executives compare job offers based on where their families will live, not only on salary. Physicians, engineers and researchers weigh a city's cultural vibrancy alongside its schools, neighbourhoods and quality of life. Investors read a city's cultural confidence as a proxy for its long-term confidence in itself. A skyline may get a city noticed, but it is the life inside it, the music and theatre and dance, that persuades people to stay.

Calgary and Edmonton have spent a generation building the physical infrastructure of world-class cities. The cultural infrastructure is what converts that investment into a place people choose. Alberta Ballet is one of the few institutions in the province that can stand on a stage in Rome or Dubai and say, credibly, this is what Alberta makes.

The province-building case runs deeper still. Alberta Ballet not only trains students from around the world, but also young Albertans who desire to train to a professional international standard without their having to leave home to do it. It brings free dance programming to communities in Medicine Hat, Red Deer, Fort McMurray, Fort McKay, and Grande Prairie, prioritizing those Indigenous students, socio-economically marginalized kids, and those families new to Canada. Alberta Ballet employs artists, technicians, educators and administrators, and it anchors a broader dance ecology of independent choreographers, studios, and the artists who teach in them, which does not exist at scale without a flagship company at its centre.