Three months ago, ballerina Skylar Frye found herself at a crossroads. After studying ballet from age 8, and 10-hour days and performances every night for weeks at a time during her four years at the University of Arizona, she was tired.
“I took a little break from dancing,” Frye said. “I think in a lot of ways, I was pretty burnt out and kind of needed to get my head back together and figure out if I still wanted to do it in a professional capacity.”
She was living in Pennsylvania, working random jobs in New Jersey and New York and spending an inordinate amount of time commuting. To add to her malaise, Frye was also rehabbing injuries she sustained in a car accident in October.
“And then Ileana and Franklin reached out and said, "Hey, do you want to come back and dance ‘Nutcracker’ with us?”
Iliana Lopez and Franklin Gamero are the artistic directors at Gulfshore Ballet. Frye trained with them until she left for college.
Now, they were offering her the opportunity to come full circle. Her first ballet was “The Nutcracker” with Miami City Ballet at Artis-Naples when she was 8 years old. She was an angel.
“The productions were incredible, and as a kid, you rarely have the opportunity to be part of something so special, performing alongside some of the greatest professionals out there.”
She went on to perform as a soldier the next two years and as a hoop the year after that.
After aging out of the kids’ roles, Frye joined Gulfshore Ballet, where she was lead Spanish, Dew Drop and Snow Queen. When Gulfshore Ballet performs “The Nutcracker” this weekend at the Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall, she’ll reprise her roles as Dew Drop and lead Spanish and be one of two Snowflake soloists.
“It's really fun to revisit a role that I was doing as a student, and now I'm coming back with a lot more maturity,” Frye said.
She’s also coming back to ballet as a professional dancer.
“I've rediscovered my love for dance — whether it's the hard work in the studio or the moments onstage under the lights,” Frye added. “So, I'm not exactly sure where I'll go next, but I think I'm going to just put myself out there, keep an open mind and stay working hard on everything because I definitely am not ready to stop dancing anytime soon.”
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Frye got her start in dance at Backstage Dance Academy. In addition to ballet, she was doing competitive dance and performing a lot. A friend, Caroline Buckeye, told her about Gulfshore Ballet.
“She was a little older than me,” Frye recalled. “She was going to Gulfshore Ballet a few days a week, and it was through her that I saw someone else advancing their training. I was in sixth or seventh grade at the time, and my mom started driving me to Fort Myers as much as she possibly could, too. So I started training half in Naples and half here.”
Even though she wasn’t training full time, Iliana Lopez and Franklin Gamero nevertheless included her in Gulfshore Ballet productions.
“I was doing a lot of competitions and still performing a lot, which I really enjoyed, but it was a whole other level to be in something like ‘The Nutcracker,’ dancing on pointe,” Frye noted.
Frye thrived during her time at Gulfshore Ballet. She enjoyed the discipline, the drive to meet and exceed goals, the air of professionalism that permeated the school and Gulfshore Ballet’s performances.
That training inspired her to continue her training at the collegiate level.
“I wanted to go to university,” said Frye. “I applied to 15 different schools across the country. I was accepted by the University of Arizona. Their dance program was wonderful. I was also able to double major and kind of have that classic university experience. I really enjoyed my time there.”
But Frye found dancing 12 hours a day and sometimes performing every night for weeks at a time while keeping an “A” average as an English major challenging.
She quickly discovered that dancing at the collegiate level was more than just rehearsals and performances.
“You're also asked to be very academic with your dancing,” Frye pointed out. “It’s a lot of reflection, a lot of learning about the body, a lot of researching dance in a way that I really enjoyed. And it's a competitive environment. If you don't show up one day, you might lose your spot for the next which, of course, prepares you for the real world.”
Still, she refused to be one-dimensional.
“I also tried to be very involved on campus. I was in clubs. I had a lot of friends outside of the dance program. It was a lot of late nights. Being able to juggle both an academic life and life as a ballet dancer is no easy feat, especially being amongst some really great dancers.”
But she not only degreed in Dance and English, but also graduated summa cum laude.
Frye admits to feeling physically and mentally exhausted by the time she earned her BFA.
“It definitely was a whirlwind, which was wonderful,” Frye added. “I wouldn’t take any of it back. It really taught me how to take care of myself and take it easy. I learned a lot of life skills. But it was really demanding both physically as well as mentally.”
She graduated in 2024 and, after undertaking auditions all over the country, she joined Roxey Ballet in Pennsylvania. She also served as director of education and outreach.
“I taught there as well,” said Frye. “So that was a big job. It was a lot of work, but it was really meaningful work. I learned a lot, especially about the role of arts organizations within a community. I did a lot of work trying to get school boards connected to the arts, having performances that we could bring local children to and arranging school shows. We were not just growing the ballet company, but we were also helping our community get involved and having kids understand ballet and dance. It doesn't really matter if they're going to grow up and be a dancer. If they grow up with that appreciation, I think that it's really important. So that meant a lot.”
Along the way, she made amazing friends and danced with people from around the globe. But she eventually left Roxey Ballet.
“So I would say for the past year or so, I've kind of been in the school of life,” Frye said.
She took a break from dancing, worked a number of random jobs and recalibrated her life trajectory.
“And after a while, I think I gained a lot of life experiences.”
But she missed dancing.
“I was working in New York, so I would go and take class, and I remember that was always my favorite part of the week,” Frye shared. “But I wasn't doing it professionally anymore and I didn't exactly know where I was heading yet with dance. I didn't know if I was going to be ready for an audition season because I just didn't have consistent training and that's something that is really important when you go into an audition season that you feel ready, that you're physically prepared, mentally, you know, just really in the groove of it all.”
It was while she was at that crossroads that she received the call from Lopez and Gamero inviting her to perform with Gulfshore Ballet and Gulf Coast Symphony in Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker” ballet.
“My life was super hectic, so the thought being able to come home and be in a place with amazing people who would push me every day to be better really appealed to me,” said Frye. “I would have consistent training and also a goal. It was just the best news.”
So she returned to Naples in November.
“I'm living with my parents in Naples, which has been really nice because I haven't spent this much time with them since I was in high school,” Frye added. “But yeah, it's really meant the world to be able to come back, have a place where all I have to do every day is show up and work hard and then see where all of that takes me.”
Her path hasn’t been as smooth, as straight or as unencumbered as other professional and pre-professional dancers, but Frye is mindful that she’s nevertheless a role model for the school’s younger students.
“That’s a wild experience, too,” Frye observed. “When I first came back, I saw all these faces that were 4 and 5 years old the last time I was really dancing consistently here. So many of them are growing up and they're doing lead roles and they've just taken their dancing so far. That’s really inspiring to me. And it's really wild to think that I might be inspiring them, too.”
Frye works hard to set a good example by working hard and consistently improving herself and preparing for her roles in “The Nutcracker.” She also makes herself accessible to the school’s young dancers by answering questions and verbalizing her support. But the experience is as rewarding for her as it is for them.
“It's very humbling, actually, to come back and have younger kids look up to you. It brings the magic of Nutcracker back because you remember when you were a little kid and you were looking up to the girls wearing the tutus and the older ballerinas that you wanted to be like,” she said. “So it's really special to just remember that and then remember that the example I'm setting is what they're looking up to right now. I just hope that it inspires them to always work hard. The show is really important, but it's really the work that we do every day here trying to make ourselves better, working hard, just making art on a daily basis, I think is really important.”
While returning to Gulfshore Ballet has reinvigorated Frye, she’s aware that the road ahead is far from smooth for any professional dancer.
“A lot of my friends are working towards being a doctor or an engineer,” Frye noted. “They have very linear career paths. Choosing to be a dancer professionally is a really hard because you always have to lead with your love for it because it's not the most stable job. You don't always have health insurance. There’s not a lot of job security. So, it's really about always knowing what it means to you and that's what has to keep you going.”
Dancing professionally also requires discipline and sacrifice.
“There's a big separation between work and life balance for most people,” Frye added philosophically. “Your friends and family don't quite understand that. When you're a dancer, it has to be a lot of your life. You may want to be a balanced person, but you also know the rest of your life has to reflect what you do as well.”
Everyone can relate to the temptation of taking a day off from the gym or overindulging during the holidays. Dancers don’t have that luxury. They cannot afford days off and the dietary restrictions are inflexible.
Dancing is a lifestyle choice and lifelong commitment.
In addition, dancing can entail a rollercoaster of emotion.
“There are a lot of good days, but there are also difficult ones and you have to have the mental toughness to power through,” Frye observed. “You have to constantly take care of your body, too. Even though we’re spending hours in the studio, a lot of us are doing lots of physical therapy to help with injuries, old and new. You're always recovering from something, but you're also trying to get stronger at the same time.”
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
