Pennsylvania Ballet soloist Barette Vance has been dancing since she was two and a half, but she didn’t start out on a ballet track. “For the first few years I was focused on jazz and gymnastics, like most of my friends,” she says. “Ballet was just an extra. But eventually I realized the scope and possibility of ballet, and figured out that was where my heart was.”

Today Vance’s jazz background shines through in her performances of contemporary work like Val Caniparoli’s Lambarena and the ballets of PAB choreographer-in-residence Matthew Neenan. “Many of the newer ballets involve isolations of the hips and the rib cage—something that ballet dancers have trouble with,” Vance says. “Even out in clubs ballerinas tend to look funny! But thanks to my jazz training, I’ve been working on those types of movements for years.”