Her Radio City Rockettes Audition Forced Her to Reckon with Rejection, Then She Faced More Disappointment 1 Year Later (Exclusive)

Alicia Mae Holloway looks back and describes her younger self as “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed” walking into her first audition for the Radio City Rockettes in 2021. She had just left her ballet company, the Dance Theater of Harlem, and was keen to take the next leap into her career.

Her road to the Rockettes audition room veered differently from most other hopefuls around her, in the sense that Holloway didn’t always envision herself landing a spot on the iconic ensemble. But when her agent emailed to say the dance company reached out requesting Holloway come try out, she was thrilled by the prospect.

“I was like, ‘You know what? This could be a really new opportunity. This could be something totally different than I’m used to,'” the trained ballerina, 29, tells PEOPLE. “I was so over the moon. I was so excited.”

But her newfound dream was crushed after just one day of the process. She was sent home after the first round of auditions, and though Holloway was already six years into her professional career, she faced something still completely novel to her: rejection.

“That was actually the first audition I had ever been cut from,” says Holloway. “I’m not trying to toot my own horn, but that’s very rare for a dancer to be 25 years old and never cut from something. I felt really upset.”

She received the news and reacted in the same way anyone else might handle their first bout of rejection. She made a tearful phone call to her dad and wept all the way home. Once she cried out all of her tears, she pulled herself together and went out for dinner.

“I remember sitting down and ordering my meal, and I was like, ‘This is the impetus that just gave me the incentive to want to try again,'” she explains. “Even though I’m down bad right now, I know that I loved the experience.”

Holloway concluded that the rejection didn’t completely color her experience. She loved the audition setting and the type of choreography they taught. Even four years later, the dancer tells PEOPLE she still remembers the precision jazz combo the potential Rockettes had to learn.

“I love the style of dance that I was doing. It was something that was new to me, however [also] familiar to me,” she said, noting that her childhood dance studio wasn’t exclusively focused on ballet. “So although the technique itself was new, the precision aspect was new, the jazziness and the flair of it was something that I was familiar with that I hadn’t done in such a long time, being a ballerina.”

She also appreciated the “high-pressure” energy in the room. Given the Rockettes’ worldwide renown, there was a competitive air in the audition.

“After every dancer, every group performed, the room was really tense, because all of us were really excited and hopeful to get contracts,” says Holloway. “Even though there was a sense of hope and excitement, there also was a sense of tension in the room.”

That night after her first rejection, she felt determined to return to the Rockettes audition, even though she didn’t necessarily know how to improve for the following year. She did receive some words of encouragement from one of the people running the audition, but they didn’t give any fixable critiques about her technique.

“The feedback wasn’t something specific where they were like, ‘You need to have higher kicks or do more pirouettes,'” says Holloway. “It was more like, ‘The training and style is very precise. We want you to come back, because we really like you.'”

When she returned one year later for the 2022 auditions, Holloway danced her way through both days of the audition. She was never cut, but she never heard back after the final round.

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She didn’t make the dance group, but it wasn’t necessarily a rejection. Plus, her second audition experience was a positive one. She felt very confident in her performance, enough so that she’s considering re-auditioning again in 2026.

“I firmly believe that rejection is redirection. Even though I was really upset and hurt that it didn’t work out the way I wanted it to, it redirected me into a path where I could grow and flourish,” says Holloway. “And I’m going to see the Rockettes next week, so maybe I’ll reaudition in the future. Maybe in the spring.”