Dancers Audition for $1 Million in Scholarships

NEW YORK—About 1,500 young dancers from nearly a hundred dance studios across the country and beyond have gathered in New York City this week for the New York City Dance Alliance’s (NYCDA) National Season Finale.

“The dancers come in from across the United States, and they’re part of an event that’s really an educational event,” said NYCDA Executive Director Joe Lanteri. “We’re giving them a taste of what the professional world might offer.”

Dancers arrived last Wednesday and will be in the city through July 7. The week-long event is full of auditions, workshops with choreographers, and performances, where recruiters from Radio City Music Hall and Broadway productions, as well as from different colleges, will be present.

“‘Billy Elliot’ comes every year, looking for boys and girls. Two of the three Billies right now are Dance Alliance kids,” Lanteri said. ‘Annie’ and ‘Peter Pan’ will also be returning to Broadway and recruiting dancers.

The scholarships are merit-based, and the number of students or amount per student will vary from school to school.

“The goal is that by our gala, which is on Thursday night, these scholarships will be awarded. We’re hoping for a million dollars in scholarship awards,” Lanteri said. “How many [each school] gives out will really be based on what happens here today.”

Six judges from four colleges—the University of Arts, Marymount Manhattan College, Point Park University, and the Maryhurst College—were present at the auditions. “When we did this last year, we only had two colleges,” Lanteri recalled.

The NYCDA has been working with dancers across the country for 17 years, but became a foundation only last October. With funding from the foundation included, the scholarship amount has doubled from half a million dollars awarded last year.

“We are very pro-education. We say, ‘Go to college, go invest in yourselves,’ but some of them [dancers] feel they don’t have the financial means to make that happen,” Lanteri explained. “It is merit-based, but unlike some auditions where you might meet that dancer and spend a day with them, we have really watched these dancers year after year, watched them grow up, and we know their situations.”

Tiler Peck, one of the New York City Ballet’s 24 principal dancers and a NYCDA alum, led the auditions of 108 high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors competing for scholarships.

“Don’t cheat, I want to see a good position,” she told the participants. “You want to finish up, so you don’t fall over.” All dancers auditioned in one room, where Peck demonstrated a short routine and they repeated it in groups divided by age.

Ashlynn Miller, a dancer with the Plumb Performing Arts Company in Arizona, said she has been dancing for 12 years—since she was 3 years old. She plans to audition for the scholarships next year, when she’ll be eligible, so that she could pursue dance professionally.

“We practice from 9 in the morning to 5:30, maybe 7:30 [during competition season]—long hours,” Miller said. Otherwise, she shows up to her dance studio every day after school for three hours. “[To qualify as] Outstanding Dancers, we have a solo and two auditions, but our studio is doing altogether 50 routines. Not all of us are in all of them,” she explained.

Lanteri said that dance studios around the country have done a tremendous job and have helped the event grow every year in both numbers and talent.

Jami Artiga, one of the studio directors for Dance Zone from Las Vegas, said that out of their 600 students, 43 came to compete this year.

“We’ve been coming to NYCDA’s regionals and nationals for about 10 years,” Artiga said, adding that they’ve been preparing since August. “We qualify, get the next numbers ready, [and] qualify then, so everyone has enough dances to make it fun for them to come and compete.”

“It’s an amazing competition,” she added. “It’s run really, really well. We trust the teachers, we trust the judges, [and] we really admire the integrity of the competition. It’s hard to find.”

Artiga’s son, Michael, 12, has been dancing for six years. “I like it. I get to travel, and I actually made a lot of friends this year,” he said.