Dance

From Boston Ballet Dancer to Questrom MBA Student

Retired from the dance world, Isaac Akiva is at BU to figure out his next steps

For much of his life, Isaac Akiva was dedicated to ballet. He was a professional dancer with Boston Ballet, performing in more than 90 productions across the globe. He danced four to six hours a day, six days a week, earning the coveted role of soloist with the renowned company. 

After tearing his ACL in 2019, Akiva returned to dance, ultimately choosing to retire from the stage in 2023. He was at the pinnacle of his career and the decision to step away was a hard one. But he decided to take on a new challenge—earning an MBA at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. he is now in his third and final semester. 

“It was like drinking from a firehose as a former artist,” he says with a laugh. “There have been ups and downs in terms of stress. But I really enjoy it.”

A local kid from JP

Akiva grew up in nearby Jamaica Plain, and at the age of nine was invited to take classes at Boston Ballet through its Citydance program, which provides free dance classes to local Boston Public Schools third graders.

“I started dancing in a great way that felt very accepting,” he says. “Typically ballet is thought of as a very feminine, girly thing to do. But because I was going with my third grade classmates, there wasn’t a stigma to it. We felt special being bused into Boston Ballet once a week for 10 weeks.” After the program ended, Boston Ballet invited him to continue taking classes, a pursuit his parents—both artists and photographers—fully supported. 

It was after a performance of Boston Ballet’s Don Quixote that the then-10-year-old realized what he was learning in his introductory classes were the building blocks of a professional dance life. But then his teen years hit, and his initial excitement wavered. “I just didn’t have the work ethic yet,” he says.

Two things happened to change that. The first was a stern talking to from his teacher when he failed to attend a Saturday morning class. “She just sat me down and said that this was totally unacceptable. She said, ‘You have to make a decision. Do you want to do this?’ And I said yes, and from that moment, I showed up.” The second was starting to realize what an extraordinary opportunity he had: some of his classmates had traveled from different states, even countries, to study at Boston Ballet. Meanwhile, he was able to hop on an Orange Line train from Jamaica Plain to the studio—a 10 minute commute. 

He improved quickly and dance soon became all-consuming. He dropped out of high school his junior year (he later earned a GED) to study ballet full-time. In 2007, he was invited to join the professional company and rose from apprentice to corps de ballet to demi-soloist, and finally, to soloist. He says one of his favorite roles is in the Russian dance from The Nutcracker, which viewers might recognize as the part of the ballet with all the deep squats and soaring leaps. It’s a technically tricky role and requires phenomenal technique and stamina.

During his 15 years as a professional dancer with Boston Ballet, Akiva danced in more than 90 productions across 10 countries. He says that in addition to The Nutcracker, some of his favorite roles were as one of the sailors in the company’s production of Jerome Robbins’ Fancy Free, and ballets by choreographers Yuri Killian and William Forsyth. 

A pivot away from the stage

The career of a ballet dancer can be notoriously short-lived. Injuries like stress fractures, arthritic knees and ankles, and lower back pain are inevitable due to the physically demanding nature of dancing. Akiva had considered himself fortunate in being relatively injury-free until the ACL tear (during a performance of The Nutcracker) forced him to stop dancing while he recuperated. It was the first time since he could remember that he’d had a chance to breathe.

“I think when I got injured, then had surgery in early 2020, and then COVID hit, during that year and a half of me doing rehabilitation to get back to work, I experienced life,” Akiva says. “I had never lived before. The values of autonomy and flexibility in my schedule—I actually got to experience that for the first time.” He became more serious about his Jewish faith, made friends outside of dance, and worked towards finishing his bachelor’s degree at Northeastern, which he had begun in 2014. But it wasn’t until later that he started thinking about graduate school.

He returned to dance in 2021, but everything had changed for him. “When I came back to that very strict schedule and very limited autonomy over what I did, I felt very restricted and unhappy,” Akiva says, speaking deliberately and thoughtfully. “I had completely different feelings about it and realized I really needed to think about retiring.” In May 2022, he told the Boston Ballet that the next season would be his last.

He wrote a lengthy first-person account for Boston magazine about his decision to retire, titled “Why I Left the Boston Ballet.” He says the essay is one of his proudest achievements. “As a dancer you don’t have much of a voice and to finally be able to say something for myself—that felt really important to me,” he says.

In the article, he discusses how the decision to retire produced a mix of feelings, one of which was anxiety. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” he says, “so it was sort of like, well, how am I going to survive?”

Grad school appealed to Akiva because it would allow him to stay close to home and his friends and family, and he also knew that since he was making a 180-degree turn from his previous professional life, it would give him space and time to carefully think about a new career. And he liked Questrom’s environment, which combines rigorous academics with different specialization possibilities. 

After Akiva retired from Boston Ballet, a friend who was in real estate suggested he get a real estate license so he could make some money on the side. Over the past year and a half, working as an agent at Hammond Residential, he’s discovered that he loves the profession. He says he’s drawn to the entrepreneurial nature of the business, the fact that it’s a people-facing job, and the flexibility it affords. “Being a real estate agent really checks off all those boxes for me,” he says. Flexibility is especially important, since he is a Modern Orthodox Jew and is offline from Friday night to Saturday night.

In his free time, Akiva enjoys spending time with his wife (they were married last year) and their two Beagles, Barbara and Walter, and hosting big dinners for friends. While he no longer performs or takes classes himself, he occasionally teaches ballet classes for kids and teenagers in the Boston area. 

“I like exercising that muscle, and just accessing that knowledge that I have, and then giving it to other people that love it,” he says. “That’s a great experience.”