LEBANON — Jennifer Henderson was a senior in high school in 1999, when City Center Ballet came to life.

For years she had been studying at Lebanon Ballet School, which Linda Copp had founded in the mid-1980s.

“She had built up a really excellent program,” Henderson, who is now City Center’s artistic director, said in an interview this week in the space the ballet company and the school share in downtown Lebanon.

As good as the school’s program was, it was losing some of its most committed students. They would go to other programs in the summer and found there more opportunities to perform and to work with guest artists. Some left the Upper Valley to attend dance-focused programs during the school year.

“There was a group of dancers who were wanting to pursue dance,” Copp said in a phone interview. “In order to do that, you have to have performance experience.”

So Copp and Ruth Mayer founded City Center Ballet to provide those performance opportunities close to home.

On Saturday, City Center will celebrate 25 years of furnishing both a stage to ballet students and performances to Upper Valley audiences. The company and guests will perform a brief, narrated version of “Peter and the Wolf,” choreographed by Mayer, at 2 p.m. in Lebanon Opera House. At 7 p.m., the company will perform excerpts from its repertoire, also at Lebanon Opera House. And there’s an after-party, a ticketed fundraiser for the ballet company that’s open to the public, at the ballet school a few doors away from the opera house.

The start of City Center Ballet was a key moment of evolution for the study of classical ballet in the Upper Valley.

The company, which Mayer led until 2006, performed not only in Lebanon, but around the immediate area, in Chandler Music Hall in Randolph; in Woodstock’s Town Hall Theatre; and at Kimball Union Academy in Meriden.

While the ballet school, which is affiliated with City Center, held a recital at the end of the year, performing a ballet was the next step.

“To be able to go to different theaters and present stories to the community was really exciting,” Henderson said.

While traveling to other venues became too expensive to sustain, City Center has continued to perform at Lebanon Opera House. The company now has 13 ballets in its repertoire, ranging from such classics as “Giselle” and “Sleeping Beauty,” one of the first ballets the company performed, to more recent works choregraphed by Henderson, including “Clara’s Dream,” the company’s own adaptation of the “Nutcracker” story.

Henderson has done much of the company’s creative work over the past 15 years and became artistic director last year. That includes reimagining such classics as “Alice in Wonderland” and “Cinderella,” in addition to “The Nutcracker,” Copp said. Copp still operates the ballet school as her for-profit business, and still teaches young dancers, mostly ages 7 to 10.

Ballet occupies its own niche in the Upper Valley’s performing arts landscape. While the area has become known for modern dance — thanks in part to the birth of Pilobolus, the groundbreaking dance company, at Dartmouth in the 1970s — ballet provides an outlet for young people in need of a mode of physical expression that also requires discipline.

“I wasn’t a kid who was drawn to sports,” Henderson said. “But there was something about using my body as an instrument.” There’s something that fuels dancers from the inside, she added. Dance generally requires the same time commitment as a sport, with lessons four or five times a week.

Albert Einstein, Copp noted, called dancers “the athletes of God.”

While the company does send students on to higher education in dance, many go into other fields, where their dance training stands them in good stead.

“I have more surgeons than I do dancers,” Copp said. “It’s the same discipline.” In every field, people have to show up, be prepared, ask questions and understand their role, all of which ballet demands.

The coronavirus pandemic nearly shut down the company, Copp said. It survived partly through the largesse of the Jack and Dorothy Byrne Foundation.

“We lost a whole segment of dancers who never returned,” Copp said.

The company has rebounded, though, nearly selling out Lebanon Opera House when it returned to performances at the end of 2022, Henderson said.

“As long as there’s that interest and that flow of kids ... I sure hope that it will be here for them,” she said.

For tickets to City Center Ballet’s performance of “Peter and the Wolf” ($10), to the evening performance ($15.50-$28) or to the after-party ($33-$53), go to lebanonoperahouse.org or call 603-448-0400.

Out of her shell

In a brief phone conversation, Abbey Glover, who will perform her solo show at Artistree’s Grange Theater on Friday night, described leading a kind of double life.

While she was establishing herself in the world, getting an MBA at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business in 2018, then working in tech, she had experiences that hinted at something hidden.

At Tuck, for example, she took a course called Communicating with Presence, taught by a Dartmouth theater professor. As part of Tuck Tales, an evening of storytelling, she talked about how she felt she didn’t fit in.

During the pandemic, in September 2020, “I had this moment of just, like, I can’t hold it in anymore,” Glover said. She started writing and “realized I had this story to tell.”

The story, it turned out, was about her unacknowledged desire to perform and express herself. The solo show, “Abbey’s Box,” dramatizes Glover’s struggles to feel at home in the world by situating the young narrator in a big cardboard box, a safe place to house her insecure young self, until she needed to grow.

“I wanted to be an actor,” Glover said. But “slowly I just got more insecure about having those dreams.” She developed a strong inner critic. “I just totally, totally bottled it up for like 16, 17 years.”

This doesn’t mean Glover, now 35, wasn’t a functional person. Living in San Francisco, she had meaningful work, including at LinkedIn.

But “every job I had, I would have a crisis of, like, ‘What is it all for?’ ” she said. “I had something inside me telling me, ‘This is not it.’ ”

It’s a shocking state of affairs to consider how many people might be walking around feeling this way while seeming content to shuffle to work and other commitments.

Friday’s performance brings Glover to home ground. Though she grew up in Connecticut, her grandfather and father, both named Paul Glover, were Hanover residents, and her aunt, Wendy Thompson, was a longtime teacher at Norwich’s Marion Cross School. She previewed the show last July at Artistree before taking it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where it enjoyed great reviews.

For tickets ($15-$20), which were few in number as of late Tuesday, go to artistreevt.org.

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.