Camino Classical Ballet, founded in 2019, has already seen several of its students go on to attend prestigious ballet schools and join professional dance companies in cities including San Francisco, Kansas City, and New York. Nestled in the woods of Pollock Pines, the ballet school provides professional instruction to adults and children as young as four. Sitting for an interview in the school’s studio, Director Gina Domenichelli-Illingworth exudes warmth, humor, and an infectious enthusiasm for ballet. Gina’s career as a professional ballerina took her to cities all over the world, from Oslo, Norway, to Erie, Pennsylvania, as a performer, director, and teacher; she has founded ballet companies, received degrees in Ballet and Organizational Leadership, and worked with legendary figures in the world of ballet. To her students here in the studio, though, she’s just Ms. Gina.

Gina was born and raised in Healdsburg, a small, rural town in Sonoma County. Her dad loved to work the family farm; her five brothers played sports. “My sister wanted to find something for us girls to do,” Gina recalls. “Back then there was really nothing in Healdsburg, but a woman from the Philippines, Ms. Kane, had moved there and started a ballet studio.” Gina loved ballet from the beginning. “I was always a ham—I liked performing, I liked moving around, I liked music. It all just meshed for me.” At age ten, she auditioned for the San Francisco Ballet and received a scholarship to attend their summer program; her parents drove her from Healdsburg to San Francisco every day. Gina, who had once written in her journal that she wanted to be a pastry chef or a performer on Saturday Night Live, was on her way to becoming a professional ballerina.

In 2013, Gina and her husband returned to California to care for her aging parents. They purchased a property in Apple Hill, where Gina built a small dance studio and began giving private lessons. As if in a pirouette, her career had come full circle. Her parents’ support had given her the opportunity to leave Healdsburg and live in cities all over the world; now, to support her parents, she had moved from the city to a rural community much like the Healdsburg of her childhood.

Another symmetry formed when she founded Camino Classical Ballet, giving the children of the rural community she now calls home the same lifechanging opportunity that Ms. Kane had once given her in Healdsburg. “I want to give my students the same experiences that I had,” Gina explains. “I just love that small community feeling that you can find here. I can offer the really intense training you would get in a city, but more community-oriented and friendly. Ballet is technical and rigorous, but I try to make it fun.”

As an instructor, Gina upholds a standard of excellence. “I know what it takes,” she says. “If kids around here see something like “The Nutcracker” on TV and they want to do it, then I want to show them how to do it correctly.” Her approach has made El Dorado County a hotbed of ballet talent: Ameliah Wanta, age thirteen, started at Camino Classical Ballet at age eight and was accepted into the San Francisco Ballet’s summer program at eleven, then the American Ballet Theater School in Los Angeles at twelve. This summer she will attend the prestigious School of American Ballet in New York City.

Gina notes that Camino Classical Ballet isn’t just for those who want to pursue a career in ballet. “Ballet is almost as much a sport as an art--there is so much physicality and athleticism in it. Then, as a performance art form, it draws in acting and music. Ballet is the great base for all other dance forms.” Even if students don’t continue in dance, they will receive something valuable from their experience: “The discipline, dedication, and focus that they learn here carries over into the rest of their life.”