In 2022, Lleyton Ho was at a crossroads. He’d just wrapped up his first full season as a corps de ballet member with San Francisco Ballet (the previous two seasons’ programming had been interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic), and he was eager to continue dancing with the company. Ho had completed his freshman year at Stanford University the year before, and the leave of absence he’d taken since then to pursue ballet was about to expire. He had to make a decision: Would it be college life or company life? “I thought to myself, What if I just did both?” remembers Ho. “If someone tells me something is impossible, I say, ‘Actually, it’s possible, and I’m going to make it happen.’ ”
Thanks to surgically precise scheduling and a hefty dose of determination, Ho graduated from Stanford this past spring with an economics degree. He spent the previous three years balancing San Francisco Ballet’s 45-week contract with 8:30 am economics lectures, commuting 35 miles from campus to studios. And while the experience was by no means easy, Ho is keenly aware of the positive impact it’s had on his life—and his relationship to ballet. “Having this degree now allows me to dance because I really want to,” he explains. “My livelihood isn’t dependent on ballet. Every day that I go into the studio, it’s because I really want to be there. That’s really liberating.”
A Salient Impact
“I grew up sailing and picked it back up when I moved to San Francisco, as part of a racing crew. I think it’s made me a better corps member, and a better person in the studio. On the crew, the emphasis is very much on being a team, and you communicate through sensing each other and the movements of the boat—there’s a lot of situational awareness involved. This translates to ballet in that it’s helped me develop a better sense of teamwork, and of being connected to the people around me.”
Diving Into the Data
“Something that sparked my interest significantly as an undergraduate and still find fascinating is the dynamics and data behind ballet audiences. Can you predict what audiences will like, based off the data you have on them? How do you program to bring in certain audiences? How do you build an audience? It’s always on my mind, and I’d love to utilize those skills in the future to boost the arts.”
Photo by Amy Drake.
A Moment of Clarity
“In 2022, I was thrown into Yuri Possokhov’s Magrittomania last minute. I had under two hours to rehearse the ballet before the show. I remember standing in the wings and, for a millisecond, just felt sheer terror, because this was the least prepared I’d ever been to perform a ballet. But it went well, and that experience made me realize I couldn’t give up ballet, because even in the terror, I loved what I was doing.”
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