Island Native To Be Featured In 2025 Nantucket Dance Festival

The Nantucket Dance Festival returns to the island this week, and this year’s edition features a Nantucket native.

Peter DeCarlo, a ballet dancer who grew up on Nantucket before studying dance at the Walnut Hill School for the Arts in Natick, Massachusetts and the School for American Ballet in New York City, returns home this July to perform at the festival’s benefit performance, where he will dance to a concerto by contemporary classical composer Caroline Shaw.

“I'm excited to dance professionally back where I started,” DeCarlo said. “I'm excited to be back with the friends that I grew up with, and see them, and they'll also be able to see what I've been working on for the last four years. It's really become my entire life.”

Hosted by the Nantucket Dance Theater, the festival features a series of educational events and performances throughout the week, leading to the final benefit performance in Nantucket High School’s Mary P. Walker Auditorium. Tickets are available for purchase on the festival’s website, and the event will also be livestreamed.

“We're really trying to make sure there is something for everyone,” festival co-chair Michelle Birmingham said.

There are educational events for islanders of all skill levels and ages, and even events that are not primarily designed as classes will include educational components. Birmingham stated that the festival is dedicated to enhancing the accessibility of dance on the island.

“We really want to make sure we have an educational component to all of our events,” she said.

DeCarlo will be helping to teach some of the classes, giving back to the community where he first began his dance career. DeCarlo’s first dance teachers on Nantucket were Aleks Nicolić and Birmingham herself.

“I was dancing at [Birmingham’s] studio pretty much from when I was seven or eight until I was 14,” he said. “By the time I was in eighth grade, I had kind of already known that I wanted to take it more seriously, and I knew that if I wanted to do that, I had to move away from Nantucket.”

Birmingham helped him find dance options off-island, and has continued to watch his career unfold as he progressed through his education. Now, DeCarlo is back where it all began. After graduating from the School of American Ballet, widely regarded as one of the most prestigious ballet academies in the world, DeCarlo auditioned for a series of positions at different ballet companies, battling through the highly competitive world of dance to secure a spot as an apprentice with New Jersey Ballet. Then he received a message from one of the Dance Festival’s co-creative directors offering him the chance to dance on Nantucket.

“It just makes a lot of sense,” Birmingham said. “To have him back on Nantucket is such a full circle moment, and I think it's going to be really special.”

DeCarlo is the first of Birmingham’s students to return to the island as part of the festival, a unique full-circle moment for both him and his instructor. While DeCarlo is a ballet dancer, the Nantucket Dance Festival is notable for showcasing a diverse range of dance styles, including tap, krump, ballroom, and modern.

“For a lot of people, they think dance is just ballet,” Birmingham said. “There are so many styles outside of ballet.”

The Nantucket Dance Festival was initially hosted by the Nantucket Atheneum, which focused primarily on ballet. When the Nantucket Dance Theater took over the event in 2023, they expanded it to encompass a broader range of styles. But throughout the festival’s history, it has remained committed to bringing the unique art form of dance to the island.

“The energy you get from live performance or from physically experiencing dance in your own body is something that other art forms can't really capture,” Birmingham said. “There's something pretty magical about just moving to the music.”