Zero Missed Rehearsals: Inside The Washington Ballet's Move to Prospero

Scheduling from Spreadsheets

The Washington Ballet's story

Founded in 1976 by Mary Day as a professional stage for dancers trained at The Washington School of Ballet, The Washington Ballet has grown into one of the most recognized companies in American dance. Its school now trains more than 800 students across three campuses in the D.C. area. Katie Sopoci Drake, Managing Director of the School, describes it as one of the largest schools attached to a professional company anywhere in the country.

That scale, coupled with both halves of the organization scheduling in isolation, is exactly what made scheduling so hard.

Say a rehearsal moves on a Monday. On Wednesday, someone updates the studio spreadsheet. By Thursday, two different groups have booked the same studio for the same hour, neither aware the other exists. Katie has a name for this: a "manufactured emergency." Before Prospero, it happened often enough to feel routine.

"There was a lot of unnecessary back and forth," expressed Madeline Garland, Trainee Program Coordinator & Student Production Manager.

How The Washington Ballet uses Prospero

A single source of truth

In theory, the fix wasn't complicated: put the company and school on the same calendar. But implementation required something slightly more intuitive than a spreadsheet. Prospero offers more than just a transparent scheduling solution— it streamlines the workflows of both the company and the school, so both teams are incentivized to centralize their scheduling.

"I can't think of a time where studios were double-booked using Prospero and everybody on the same platform," Madeline says.

Keeping everyone on the same page when it came to rehearsal changes, classes, and room bookings went from being a daily scramble to a comfortable expectation.

One system for calendars, bookings, and changes

Filtering, tagging, and a booking portal that saves hours

When asking Company Manager Gabe Friend-Jones what changed day-to-day, two things come up immediately: filtering and tagging, and the new booking portal.

One size does not fit all when it comes to performing arts organizations, so Prospero was built to handle the dynamic nature of production planning. Tagging events then slicing & dicing with calendar filters lets the team build custom views of the schedule for whatever the moment calls for: by person, studio, location, project, etc. "You can take the information and just mold it, like putty, into any kind of final product that you want," Gabe says.

The booking portals, new in 2025, quickly became a favorite. By letting dancers book studios for themselves, booking portals cut down a layer of communication while giving bookers a clear process to provide all the information necessary for their request, cutting two to three hours of admin work from Madeline's week and taking pressure off the team. Moving a rehearsal or adding a studio hold used to mean updating several places one at a time. Now, as Katie describes their new workflow when rescheduling rehearsals, "We switch it from this day to this day and go boop! And then it's live everywhere."

Helping studios follow union rules

The Washington Ballet operates under a collective bargaining agreement with AGMA, the American Guild of Musical Artists, which sets firm rules for when schedules can be posted and when they can change. That means tracking multiple high-impact changes is a must for any scheduling system TWB is using.

Prospero handles it by keeping every change in a single system. Because everyone is using the same calendar to edit events and take notes, it’s easier to track when and why a change occurs. If a schedule shifts after the CBA's deadline, the team can flag it, so everyone can see it was an acknowledged change rather than an unexplained or ignored one.

"It definitely fosters trust within the organization, within the dancers, and within our working with the unions," Gabe says.

A season without a missed rehearsal

Keeping busy student parents updated on rehearsal schedules is not an easy feat for a school of TWB’s size. This season, for the first time according to Madeline, not a single dancer missed a rehearsal for The Nutcracker. This includes tech week, when The Washington Ballet's large roster of young students is folded into the full cast. Normally, at least one or two of the younger dancers get lost in the fray and miss a rehearsal, often due to scheduling friction. That changed with Prospero.

"This year, nobody missed rehearsals, which was huge," Madeline says. "It was the first time that not a single kid was missing from tech rehearsals. That made my job a lot easier."

Hours back each week and a season with no missed rehearsals

Breaking out of the bubble

Gabe also points to something harder to put a number on: how the organization practically works day to day. He notes how the production dance world tends to run in “bubbles”, where each team knows its own piece of the puzzle and little else.

"I think Prospero lends itself to more transparency by default," Gabe says. "Everyone works really hard, everyone works crazy hours, but we don't necessarily know what people are doing all the time. Prospero is like, oh, they're doing this, they're doing this, and that kind of thing."

Prospero uniquely allows team members to work within limited areas of the app, while still largely having access to the full calendar and resource base, so the broader scope of what is going on at an organization is always a click or two away.

Advice for other companies

When asked what advice to pass along, Katie points back to the number of systems most organizations are quietly running at once to keep gaps filled at the cost of other resources.

"I would have them take a look at how many different systems they are using, and really take a hard look at how they're doing casting and parent calendars and communication," Katie says. "Think about what their lives might be like if those were all in one place."

Instead of simply surviving the day-to-day, performing arts organizations should actively evaluate holistic solutions to systemic problems. As organizations scale, their systems need to understand the nuances of how arts professionals actually work.

Gabe doesn't expect that need to fade.

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