- December 4, 2025
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When an interviewer calls Liesl Kraft “Lisa” by accident, Sarasota Ballet Education Director Christopher Hird gently corrects her.
“Oh, Liesl, like in ‘The Sound of Music,’” the interviewer responds. But the parallel goes a bit further than that.
Liesl, age 17, is one of three siblings studying at the Sarasota Ballet Summer Intensive this summer. The other two are Johnston (Jack) Kraft, age 15, and Rosemarie Kraft, age 13. Back home in Toledo, Ohio, there are five other Kraft kids, some of whom are also studying ballet.
So, as Sarasota Ballet Marketing Director Jess Abbott observes, the Krafts could be American ballet’s answer to the singing von Trapp family of Austria. The von Trapps were made famous by Rodgers and Hammerstein’s hit Broadway musical “The Sound of Music,” also made into a movie. Its soundtrack, including such songs as “The Hills Are Alive” and “Climb Every Mountain,” forms part of the bedrock of 20th century American popular culture.
But there are no hills to be found in this tale of the dancing Kraft siblings, only ballet barres and Sarasota beaches. Along with their fellow Summer Intensive student Broc Stull, age 17, of Novi, Michigan, they sat down with a reporter to discuss life in the Sarasota Ballet’s five-week Summer Intensive.
This year the prestigious program attracted 189 students ages 12-21 from all over the U.S. Some, like the Krafts, learned about the Sarasota Ballet Summer Intensive from their ballet teachers, while others, such as Stull, found out about the program by competing in dance competitions.
Hird was a judge in the semi-finals of the Youth America Grand Prix in Chicago, where Stull competed. After seeing him perform, Hird awarded him a scholarship.
Back in Michigan, Stull studies ballet with a man, but he is the only male student in his classes. One of the things he likes about the Sarasota Ballet Summer Intensive is taking class with other male dancers in the company’s Tallevast Road studios.
According to Hird, in his ninth year as Sarasota Ballet’s education director, just 10% of the dancers in the program are male. But that’s still an improvement as far as Stull is concerned. “I’ve been able to learn faster in terms of the steps and the positions by having other guys there around me,” he says.
In addition to ballet, Stull also studies gymnastics and freestyle dancing. “Flips and tricks: I love that stuff, he says. “That adds to my dancing abilities.” Having those moves in his repertoire could help him stand out in an audition and land a role that he might not otherwise get is his thinking.
Like the Krafts, Stull comes from a dancing family. His sister is a member of a Christian dance company in the Chicago area and has been supportive of his ambition to be a professional dancer, as have his parents, he says.
Like Stull, Jack Kraft followed his sister into the dance studio. Liesl, the oldest in the family, recalls announcing to her mother before she turned 2 that she wanted to take ballet lessons. She can’t recall how she got the idea. Both her parents played serious basketball when they were young and didn’t try to steer her toward dance, she says.
Before Liesl’s mom enrolled her in dance class class at the age of 2-1/2, she showed the toddler documentaries and videos about ballet to make sure the toddler understood what she was getting into. “See, it’s hard. This isn’t something you have to do,” Liesl remembers her mom telling her.
But there was no question in Liesl’s young mind that ballet was her destiny. Fifteen years later, she still has her sights on becoming a professional dancer. She will perform in an excerpt from “Swan Lake” in the Summer Intensive’s InMotion recital, as well as an original contemporary and jazz piece, which was choreographed by Sarasota Ballet faculty Kaylin Carrera, Sea Lee and Drew Travis Robinson.
She’s also learning a key role from “La Sylphide,” but she’s not sure she will be tapped to dance it, she says.
Given gender stereotypes, it’s no surprise that Jack Kraft’s parents wanted him to be sure that ballet was his calling. He’s tall, so basketball was definitely a possibility. But Jack set his heart on ballet after seeing Liesl perform in “The Nutcracker” because it “looked like a lot of fun.”
Jack began taking ballet between the ages of 5 and 6, but he also studied gymnastics and karate. “In the beginning, they were fine with us dancing, but they wanted us to try out other things,” he says. “We dabbled in some other stuff but eventually we went all in on ballet.”
So it probably wasn’t a shock to the Krafts when Rosemarie decided to follow in her siblings’ footsteps and take ballet lessons. When all three were accepted into the 2025 Sarasota Ballet Summer Intensive, the family decided to rent an Airbnb rather than have the kids stay in a dorm at the nearby University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee campus, like most of the students in the program.
Their mom stays with them all week long while their dad comes on weekends. For Rosemarie, being surrounded by family when she isn’t dancing from 9: 30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. (excluding a lunch break), makes all the difference. It’s the first time the Kraft kids have been away from home for an extended period.
“I’m having a really good time,” Rosemarie says. “I don’t know if I’d do too great I were alone. I like having my family around me.”
Asked what they talk about when they don’t discuss ballet, the Krafts say they talk about food. “We have a lot of food allergies. I eat ‘clean’ all the time, but Jack eats meat and dairy. Still, we have to watch what we’re eating,” Liesl says.
Hird notes that even those Summer Intensive students living in a dorm can have their dietary needs met, whether they’re vegetarian, vegan or have food allergies.
Despite the rigorous class schedule, Jack Kraft says what he values most about his Summer Intensive experience isn’t training; it’s communication. “Talking with partners, asking questions, being able to be social with people — I’ve improved a lot personally,” he says.
As the reputation of the Sarasota Ballet has grown under the leadership of Director Iain Webb and his wife, assistant director Margaret Barbieri, the caliber of students applying to the Summer Intensive has grown, Hird says. Promising students in the Summer Intensive can make their way to the preprofessional program in the Margaret Barbieri Conservatory, he notes, and maybe eventually the Sarasota Ballet itself.
One big draw is that the closing recital of the Summer Intensive is held in a real theater, not a studio. In Motion will take place July 24-26 at the FSU Center for the Performing Arts.
Marketing director Abbott notes that when she was a dancer, many of the summer programs that she intended didn’t even have a recital.
There’s something new at the Summer Intensive’s InMotion recital this year. In addition to the traditional lineup of classical ballet and contemporary dance performances, there is a musical theater number. Former Broadway dancer Savannah Holds, whose two children studied in the Summer Intensive, volunteered to stage an excerpt from “Gypsy.”
Hird admits he’s biased, but he thinks the recital is something special. “I think it’s lovely for the families to see the improvement in their child’s ballet,” he says. “It’s also a chance for the community to see some really nice dancing in the summer, when there’s not much going on. Plus, you get to see the stars of tomorrow.”
You can be pretty sure one or mor of those future stars is going to have Kraft as their last name. While Liesl, Jack and Rosemarie were in Sarasota, their sister Laurelyn Kraft traveled to New York City for the School of American Ballet’s Junior Summer Intensive, a weeklong program, a recent Instagram post from Toledo Ballet reveals.
The dancing Krafts are the stuff reality TV shows are made of, though no doubt a little more wholesome than some of the programs.
