Thousands of ballerinas across the country dream of landing a spot in a major American ballet company. At 18, Sarah Steele achieved it: the Washington Ballet offered the New York City native a professional contract in 2015. While dancing full time ever since, she has also been building a digital fitness business called SteeleSculpt, which offers Pilates-inspired, no-equipment workouts taught by ballet dancers. Launched in 2019, that business has outlasted Steele’s performance career at TWB and now brings in about $2,000 recurring revenue each month. 

That kind of extra income is helpful, if not essential, for dancers in D.C.—even for those with full-time contracts. The Washington Ballet is the only professional dance company in D.C. that can employ performers full time (except for the summer months when TWB is between seasons). The company doesn’t share its pay scale, but ballet dancers nationwide make between $45,143 and $68,150 a year, according to Zip Recruiter. 

Steele danced as part of TWB’s company for eight years and says she made enough to live on. “But I wanted more financial security for myself,” she says. The answer for Steele was entrepreneurship. 

Back in 2016, Steele got certified in Pilates and taught classes at Equinox and MINT DC, both gyms in Northwest. At the time, the Washington Ballet gave their dancers a MINT gym membership as a benefit, and Steele’s company peers would take her classes. (The company also offers a small gym and physical therapy space at their Wisconsin Avenue NW studio.) 

“Then MINT started charging extra for group fitness, and that was not cool with the ballerinas,” says Steele. 

Those aforementioned ballerinas suggested that, instead of paying outside fees, Steele could teach them, for free, at the Wisconsin studio. And SteeleSculpt was born. 

“It just turned into this Sunday religious experience where we would show up at the studio, and we’d turn all the lights off, because everybody was stressed from the week or tired or even hungover,” Steele says. “People would show up, and I’d put the music really, really loud and lead a class.”  

For many millennials (like Steele) and Gen Zers, the solution for the high cost of living, inflation, and wage stagnation is often individual entrepreneurship. Also like many of these generations, her business became imbued with meaning. What started as extra side money became her way of speaking back to tired ballet tropes. SteeleSculpt is a direct response to “all of that old school toxic stuff,” she says, referring to the age-old pressure on ballet dancers to maintain a certain body type. This pressure lingers in the literal fabric of company productions, such as the Nutcracker, when the same costumes are reworn each year. Dancers often feel pressure to change their bodies to fit into the costume, rather than altering the costume to fit the dancer.

“That mean person in [a dancer’s] head who’s telling them that they don’t look good or whatever. I’m so over that mentality,” Steele says. Instead, SteeleSculpt focuses on low-impact workouts that strengthen bodies for daily life. 

About a year into Steele’s unofficial classes, COVID closed the company’s studio. But SteeleSculpt grew. On April 11, 2020, she hosted a free, live workout over Zoom. Over the next year, the production quality got better and more branded: Sunday Burn, Abs for Breakfast, Express Burn. She has since hired fellow Washington Ballet dancers as additional SteeleSculpt instructors.

Steele isn’t the only Washington Ballet dancer who’s begun running a personal business alongside their performance careers. Samara Rittinger sells baked goods on Instagram, and Nardia Boodoo models through the agency WILHELMINA and partners with brands including beauty company Glossier. Others teach ballet, run blogs, choreograph dances, and perform as paid guest artists at other companies to supplement their income and build their personal brands. 

But Steele has been among the most focused, persistent, and organized. She formed an LLC in early 2021 and launched a subscription model that same year: 50 subscribers pay $40 per month for unlimited online workouts. Five-class packs ($40) or single class drop-ins ($10) are also available for purchase via her website.

The income helps, Steele says, especially now that she is a full-time student. Steele was accepted into Harvard University in 2012 and matriculated in 2014; she left to join Washington Ballet in 2015. In June, she retired from the Washington Ballet and resumed her undergraduate degree this fall at the Ivy. 

Steele misses dancing, but SteeleSculpt is still going strong, and the work feels rewarding in a way performing sometimes didn’t. As a dancer, she executed the choreographer’s vision; as a business owner, she gets to execute her own. 

“When you see your students learning things, that’s definitely addicting, too. When you see people do an exercise perfectly that they struggled with before, or if you see someone feel a little more confident,” says Steele. “When I see my clients on social media … posting a picture of them with their family, and they’re picking up one kid and the other, I’m so proud of them. Because—way to go.”

This is part two of our Dancing in the Moonlight series that looks at how local dancers put together various part-time gigs and side hustles in order to support themselves.

Correction: This article previously identified Steele as a native of Buffalo, New York. It has been updated to say that she is originally from New York City.