Youth America Grand Prix – Dance Direct Blog. News, Reviews & Advice About Dance

Teens In Tutus

The Lincoln Centre is set to be overrun by thousands of teenage dancers, and many in tutus, as the Youth America Grand Prix begins in April.

6,636 young ballet dancers – aged 9 to 19 – have danced around the globe in preparation for the YAGP. 1,204 finalists are now heading to New York in April for a finals week culminating on stage at the David H Koch Theatre at the Lincoln Centre, a huge showcase for youth dance in uncovering future professionals.

The Youth America Grand Prix is the world’s largest student ballet competition, inviting aspiring young dancers to go head to head in competing to excel their dance careers. Young dancers come from across Asia, Australia, Europe, America and Africa, as well as the best ballet schools in the USA, hoping for an eventual place in one of the world’s best ballet companies. Following the conclusion of the competition, dozens of past winners have gone on to join companies such as American Ballet Theatre, the Mariinsky Ballet, New York City Ballet, and many others.

The Youth America Grand Prix is also one of the world’s largest dance networking events. The final round will give audiences a unique chance to see some of the world’s best young dancers perform before they go on to study around the world as a result of the $300,000 in scholarships presented annually. Since its founding in 1999, the competition has seen over 70,000 young dancers participate.

The full week for 2015 will include the finals, the Youth America Grand Prix annual ‘Stars of Today Meet the Stars of Tomorrow’ Gala and ‘David Hallberg Presents – Legacy’, all happening at the Lincoln Centre.

Sergei Filin To Judge The Youth America Grand Prix

Sergei Filin, the Bolshoi Ballet artistic director who was wounded in an acid attack that shocked the dance world last year, will appear in New York in April as one of the judges of the Youth America Grand Prix ballet competition. As an influential figure for classical ballet in Russia particularly, the coup for the Youth America Grand Prix may be a controversial one for the prestigious competition.

Filin is expected to make a couple of public appearances at performances marking the 15th anniversary of the prominent competition, which awards scholarships to young dancers, and was recently featured in the documentary film “First Position”. In addition to this Filin is expected to take a curtain call at the competition’s 15th anniversary gala on 10 April at the David H. Koch Theater, which will feature Olga Smirnova of the Bolshoi Ballet, as well as Misty Copeland and other dancers from American Ballet Theater, among the performers. Before the performance, the Russian director is then scheduled to answer questions from the stage the following night, before a performance by several prominent dancers, including Sara Mearns of New York City Ballet, Herman Cornejo of the American Ballet Theater, and Alicia Graf Mack of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

The attack on Filin last year outraged the ballet world and threw the Bolshoi Ballet into a state turmoil, watched by the rest of the world as the drama continued to unfold. A former dancer in the company, Pavel Dmitrichenko, was sentenced to six years in a penal colony for ordering the attack, which partially blinded Filin. Despite this, the sight in one of Filin’s eyes is strong enough for him to act as a judge at the Youth America Grand Prix, where the youthful talent of the dance word will perform.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

First Position

First Position, a ballet documentary-come-movie to be screened in cinemas in the UK, paints a thrilling and moving portrait of the most gifted ballet stars of tomorrow as they prepare for the chance to enter the world of professional ballet. Bess Kargman’s award-winning box office hit documentary follows six extraordinary dancers, complete with bruises, blood, injuries and near exhaustion, as they follow their dreams and enter the Youth America Grand Prix, held annually in New York for boys and girls aged 8 to 19.

Every year, thousands of aspiring dancers enter the Youth America Grand Prix as one of the world’s most prestigious ballet competitions where talented dancers compete for the coveted title. In the final round hundreds of young dancers compete for only a handful of elite scholarships and contracts and it is imperative that nothing short of perfection is performed. First Position showcases the awe-inspiring talent and passion that is displayed by the dancers, and had its World Premiere at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival and was named the audience choice’s first runner-up for Best Documentary. It also won the Jury Prize at the San Francisco Doc Fest, the audience award for Best Documentary at the Dallas International Film Festival, the audience award for Best Documentary at the Portland International Film Festival, and the audience award for Best Documentary at DOC NYC.

First Position centres around the protagonist characters of Jules Jarvis Fogarty, age 10, Aran Bell, age 11, Gaya Bommer Yemini, age 11, Miko Fogarty, age 12, Michaela DePrince, age 14, Joan Sebastian Zamora, age 16, and Rebecca Houseknecht, age 17. The dancers are from all over the world, and First Position reveals the dancers’ fates, with most of the group emerging from the competition with a statuette, award, scholarship or contract with a ballet company.

Youth America Grand Prix gala

The Youth America Grand Prix, one of the most esteemed ballet competitions in the world, assembled an all-star cast of mostly principal dancers from some of the best companies in the US, and beyond, for its highly anticipated gala. Dancers from American Ballet Theatre, the New York City Ballet, the San Francisco Ballet, the National Ballet of Canada, Boston Ballet, the Dutch National Ballet and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater were in attendance, assembled by the YAGP organisers for a programme of excerpts from ballet’s most classic and revered works.

The gala concluded and followed the regional semi-finals of the ballet scholarship competition. Named as “Ballet’s Greatest Hits”, the gala served to be a rare collection of exceptional ballet talent of tutus, pointe shoes, tights and fantastic ability, class and interpretation in one evening. In addition to this, for the first time the gala also marked the first filming of a live performance – as well as documentary footage – which will become part of Emerging Pictures “Ballet in Cinema” series broadcast to cinemas all over America in the spring.

The evening began by presenting some of the students from the previous two days of competition, demonstrating the sheer talent that is anticipated by ballet fans all over the world, solidified by the professional performances of the students’ professional counterparts. Variations from Swan Lake and La Bayadere were amongst those performed at the gala, making the evening a very special one for the competitors and the audience. Works from Ailey repertoire, The Nutcracker and Giselle were also performed, providing the audience with great hope for ballet in the twenty-first century, and beyond.

The Youth America Grand Prix

The Youth America Grand Prix was formed in 2000 as a non-profit educational organization in order to support and develop world-class dancers from the ages 9 to 19, of all backgrounds and styles of leotards. YAGP aims to provide educational opportunities and scholarships to the world’s leading dance schools for young dancers as a global network of resources and opportunities which connect students, teachers, schools and dance companies.

YAGP has been known to provide students with top-quality education and training from the directors and faculties of some of the world’s foremost companies, such as Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet and Paris Opera Ballet. As a result, YAGP refers to itself as the “internet of the dance world”, working to maintain and extend the dance network of the United States, and provide a multitude of prospects for the next generation of dancers, encouraging more to pull on their practice tights and engage with ballet.

Each year, YAGP conducts 12 regional semi-finals competitions throughout the US, and an additional 4 international competitions in Brazil, Mexico, France and Japan. Each season culminates in a week-long ‘New York City Finals’, where only around 500 of the 5000 hopefuls will compete for scholarships and professional job contracts offered. The dancers are renowned for representing 30 different countries on 5 continents, emphasising the sheer expanse of YAGP in the dance world, and just how prestigious the organisation has become since its inception.

First Position

First Position is a documentary film which focuses on seven young, international dance students preparing for the competition, working to showcase the exceptional talents of the dancers rather than focusing on the controversy of ballet competitions and the pressure they create for young people. Director Bess Kargman was inspired to create something that challenged the stereotypes of ballet and highlighted the sheer social and economic diversity of the industry. In choosing the candidates, Kargman felt it was imperative to feature students who would hold audiences’ attentions regardless of their performances throughout the competition, and – for example – the sacrifices made to facilitate ballet training such as parents making tutus and other costumes in order to save as much money as possible.

It is clear that the YAGP is one of the largest, most celebrated and influential dance competitions, presenting young dancers and their pointe shoes with the potential to truly succeed, with a fantastic opportunity in their first steps towards achieving their dance dreams.

Image courtesy of Youth America Grand Prix.