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7:30 pm
Asheville’s professional ballet company, Terpsicorps Theatre of Dance, and Michele Lee’s Center Stage Dance Studio are coming together to present the second annual showing of some of Asheville’s finest young dance talent. The success of the inaugural performance inspired many new students, eleven in fact, to commit to the grueling hours of classes and rehearsals that it takes to put on a show of this caliber. Last year’s five remarkable performers have gone on to the high school dance department at UNC School of the Arts, the prestigious Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet high school program and one is about to launch a career in commercial dance in Los Angeles.
This year’s precocious artists, ages 7th grade through high school, will perform a variety of works displaying a range of abilities. The program includes Salvatore Aiello’s “The Waiting Room”, original contemporary and neo-classical work by Heather Maloy, and traditional pas de deux from the virtuosic classical works, “Coppelia” and “Esmeralda”. This is the last year in Asheville for two of the students. One of them, Rebecca Melvin, will be attending George Washington University on a dance scholarship. The other, Jeff Ewing, is trying to decide between dance programs at UNC School of the Arts, Boston Conservatory and Julliard in NYC or an apprenticeship with NC Dance Theatre.
Terpsicorps artistic director, Heather Maloy, has been teaching alongside a talented staff of instructors at Center Stage since relocating to Asheville in 2003. Since then, the school’s ballet program has grown greatly and the students are not only winning awards at competitions, but gaining entrance into programs that will push them further down the road to professional careers in dance. In the past five years, eleven Center Stage students have been accepted into the UNC School of the Arts’ high school & college dance program, arguably one of the finest and most competitive in the nation, as well as into the dance programs at Florida State University and the Alvin Ailey School in NY. Former student Devon Kelly just got her first professional job in New York with the critically acclaimed Lydia Johnson Dance Company.
