American Ballet Theatre soloist Patrick Frenette will mark the 10th anniversary of Boys Ballet Summer Intensive (BBSI) this summer with a gala on August 14 at the Fletcher Opera Theater in Raleigh, North Carolina. The program includes excerpts from Alexei Ratmansky's Seven Sonatas and Christopher Wheeldon's This Bitter Earth, pièces d'occasion by ABT principal James Whiteside and Frenette himself, plus choreography by ABT corps member Melvin Lawovi and Stuttgart Ballet's Mitchell Millhollin.

Frenette co-founded BBSI in 2016 in Cary, North Carolina, with his mother Kimber Frenette and International Ballet Academy director Christina Fannéy. What began as a weekend workshop has grown into a three-week intensive and partnering workshop with faculty drawn from major ballet academies. His sister, Emma Lee Frenette, now serves as BBSI's artistic director.

The anniversary gala draws on the siblings' own student memories. As teenagers at Vancouver's Goh Ballet Academy, they attended a gala featuring international guest stars. "It was immensely inspiring for us," Patrick Frenette tells Pointe. "This will show our students the work that's necessary to attain this level of excellence to make it to principal dancer."

Frenette has spoken openly about the bullying he faced growing up because of the stigma attached to being a boy in ballet. That experience shaped BBSI's mission, which he describes bluntly: to provide high-quality training to gentlemen who find themselves isolated in the ballet community.

"If there is a studio with 20 young, talented female dancers, there might be one, maybe two young gentlemen who are questioning, 'Do I belong? What is my position here? How far along can I pursue this?'" he says. BBSI takes students at mixed levels, from those one or two years into training to dancers from professional academies.

Frenette argues that keeping boys in ballet depends less on recruitment than on representation. In mainstream culture, he says, "there are still very outdated and harmful stereotypes that ballet is 'only for girls." He suggests the outside world should view dancers as athletes as well as artists: "We train to be at the top of our game on a daily basis." A mainstream brand like Adidas, he argues, tapping a leading male principal for a comprehensive campaign "would create so much change."

The industry itself sends discouraging signals, he adds. "Go to a dance shop and there's 15 different black camisole leotards. And tucked away in the corner, there's one dismal dance belt, and one kind of ballet shoe." Company merchandise and marketing imagery centered on swans and tutus compound the problem. "Yes, there might be less of us, but that doesn't mean that we're not here," he says. "Being seen and represented will greatly improve the trajectory of boys who find themselves questioning their position in the ballet world."

Social media has produced one clear shift, Frenette says, by building community among male dancers in isolation. A search for the Paris Opéra Ballet School or the Royal Ballet School now shows "a class full of young men," information that lets students see "just because they're not in your ballet class, it does not mean that they're not out there."

Frenette was fortunate to train alongside other aspiring male dancers, unlike many BBSI students. "You can see the moment they register that they are now in a room of 30 to 40 other guys," he says. "It's both exciting and enlightening."

He also addresses the imbalance boys face inside the studio, where they can receive opportunities and attention their female peers do not. Smaller schools, he says, sometimes avoid disciplining boys for fear of losing them, or make a boy "the star of the show." "That's not the best way to go about this," he says. "What's important is that each student in the room, regardless of gender, is taught the same level of respect, etiquette, and consideration."

BBSI works to impart that discipline in case students are not receiving it at their home studios. "It's not the case that guys have it so much easier," Frenette says. "That is not to devalue everything that a female dancer goes through, but to say that we have our own set of challenges that cannot be dismissed."

Ten years in, the intensive's founding purpose remains unchanged: putting isolated young men in a room together and telling them, in effect, that they belong. The August 14 gala will put that message on stage.