MARLA ALEYDA

Age: 20 • Home: Beachwood • Dances: Cleveland Ballet

Marla Aleyda says it wasn’t until this year – her almost fifth on-contract with the Cleveland Ballet as a company artist – did she feel like a “real ballerina.”

A lifelong dancer, she was raised in the Cleveland Ballet company. Her mother, Gladisa Guadalupe, is the ballet’s co-founder and artistic director, and when Aleyda was 18 months old, Guadalupe began bringing her daughter into the studio.

“She didn’t want to pay for a babysitter,” Aleyda jokes.

Now a lover of all things ballet, Aleyda says she hated the art form at the start of her journey.

“For the longest time I would sit during class – like, refuse to participate,” she recalls.

However, she started to get more heavily involved in ballet at around 13, when she auditioned for the School of American Ballet in New York City. But, Aleyda was not accepted.

“I was heartbroken,” she says. “But after that I was like, you know what? It’s a sign. Everything happens for a reason. And then I stuck with it, and I was like, soon enough, something will happen. And then when I was 16, I got o ered a contract with Cleveland Ballet and I was like, this is it – this is what I was waiting for.”

Aside from the School of Cleveland Ballet, where Aleyda received most of her technical training, she also spent a summer at Gelsey Kirkland Academy of Classical Ballet in Brooklyn, N.Y. At the School of Cleveland Ballet, she was in

On View

Performances at Playhouse Square’s Connor Palace, 1615 Euclid Ave., Cleveland. Visit clevelandballet.org for tickets and more information.

• “Carmen & Other Works”: Sept. 22-23

• “The Nutcracker”: Dec. 14-23

• “Aurora: A Sleeping Beauty Story”: April 26-27, 2024 the youth company. And during her junior year of high school, she signed a contract with the company to be a company artist.

At one point, she danced, taught ballet and attended regular high school classes at Andrews Osborne Academy in Willoughby all at once. She ended up taking advantage of Ashworth College’s online schooling to complete her studies and have enough room in her day for dance.

Now, she’s 20, and has been dancing professionally for almost five years. Aleyda says being signed so young is a rarity in the dance world.

“That is extremely rare,” Aleyda says. “This is why I never want to leave (Cleveland Ballet), for this reason.”

She explains that some larger dance companies have second company or trainee programs where they keep dancers for years, sometimes until the ages of 26 or 27, but never o cially

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“Since a very early age, Marla showed a natural talent for movement. She possesses a very innate natural quality of movement that is only seen in very matured dancers. Her magnetic performance quality is almost feather like. Her musicality is precise, her execution is captivating, and her overall performance has a fierce characteristic.”