Ballet was not Caroline Hamilton’s first love. In elementary school, she much preferred the Hannah Montana jazz summer camp at the Adagio Ballet School of Dance in Arlington.
When she did switch to ballet in second grade, it was with the stipulation that she wouldn’t wear tights. The studio let her dance in her socks.
By third grade, Hamilton was taking dance classes at both Adagio and CityDance in Bethesda, where she later joined the conservatory, and at Studio Bleu Dance Center in Ashburn.
“It was a lot of driving,” says her mom, Julianne, a real estate agent who assumed the role of chauffeur. She bought ballet performances of Giselle, La Fille Mal Gardée and Sleeping Beauty on DVD for her daughter to watch in the car.
That’s when the magic really took hold. “I loved watching these dancers,” says Hamilton, now 19 and living in Dresden, Germany, where she recently became an apprentice ballerina at the historic Semperoper Ballett. “I finally understood it as a way to tell a story.”
Committing fully to ballet had its exhilarating moments—including an early role with the Debbie Allen Dance Academy’s production of Brothers of the Knight at D.C.’s Warner Theatre in 2014, for which she earned a $50 stipend.
But it also made for a less than typical childhood. From fourth to eighth grade, Hamilton switched schools five times in a seemingly endless search for an academic program that could accommodate her rigorous dance schedule.
Her parents and two siblings made sacrifices, too—uprooting and moving as a family from Westover to Falls Church, where they hoped proximity to the Beltway would ease the young ballerina’s commute, and that a combination of public school and online classes might be easier for her to juggle.
The summer after eighth grade, Hamilton attended an intensive program at The Rock School for Dance Education in Philadelphia and decided to stay.
Covid hit in the spring of her freshman year. “This was my worst nightmare,” she says. “Ballet is an art form. It’s done in a theater. You want an audience to come watch you.”
After a semester at home in Falls Church, she returned to Philly and got an apartment with her grandmother, who taught her how to grocery shop and cook for herself. In 2021, she auditioned (on Zoom) and was accepted into the Dutch National Ballet Academy’s two-year classical ballet associate degree program. Off to Amsterdam she went at the age of 16.
Hamilton graduated from that program in July and relocated to Dresden. She now dances four to 10 hours a day, cross-training with Pilates, weights and high-intensity workouts. When she’s not in rehearsals, she spends her free time breaking in and customizing her pointe shoes—“darning and sewing ’til my fingers are raw,” she says.
As one of six apprentices, she studies every role in every dance. “You’re meant to learn everything. Wherever they need you, that’s where you have to be,” she explains. “So in a way, you’re kind of every job in one.”
She admires ballerinas such as Diana Vishneva and Marianela Núñez for their ability to “dance beyond their fingers and toes” and hopes to one day land a role in her favorite ballet, Romeo and Juliet.
At the time this story was reported, her parents were researching flights, eager to see their daughter’s first performance in Germany.
“I love watching her dance,” her mom says. “As a family, it’s definitely given us opportunities to see the world in a way that we never would have.”