Ballet stars from throughout the globe will be a part of Youth America Grand Prix (YAGP) – the world’s largest ballet scholarship group – to rejoice this 12 months’s Stars of Today Meet the Stars of Tomorrow Gala on April 29, at Lincoln Center in New York City.
YAGP Founder and Artistic Director Larissa Saveliev has created a program that includes a U.S. premiere from Lucia Lacarra and Matthew Golding (YAGP alumnus), choreographed by Golding; Paris Opera Ballet’s Germain Louvet and Hannah O’Neill (YAGP alumna) will carry out Le Parc by Angelin Prejlocaj; O’Neill and Friedemann Vogel (Stuttgart Ballet) will dance a pas de deux from Act III of Onegin by John Cranko. Louvet may even current a uncommon variation from Rudolf Nureyev’s Swan Lake. The Stuttgart Ballet’s latest soloist, Yana Peneva (YAGP alumna), will make her NY debut performing the pas de deux from Act II of Le Corsaire with Daniil Simkin.
Ballet Dortmund’s Artistic Director Xin Peng Wang (in his remaining season) will current a world premiere, carried out by dancers Samuel Bassler and Daria Suzi, making their New York debuts.
The night additionally includes a world premiere choreographed and carried out by Isaiah Day (Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater), with an authentic composition and dwell musical efficiency by Emmy-nominated pianist and composer, Matthew Whitaker. Day will probably be acknowledged as one in every of two YAGP 2025 Emerging Choreographers, together with Chicago-based Hanna Brictson, whose piece Q may have its world premiere on the YAGP 2025 Gala.
The YAGP International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), that includes 25 younger dancers chosen from world YAGP auditions, will current the U.S. premiere of an excerpt from PUPO by acclaimed Italian choreographer Sofia Nappi.
A spotlight of this system contains the winners of the YAGP 2025 worldwide ballet competitors, sharing the stage with their ballet idols in a grand efficiency to carry the season to an in depth.
At the Gala dinner following the efficiency, philanthropist Sarah Hoover will probably be honored for her lifelong devotion to ballet. Hoover fundraises for a number of dance organizations and has co-founded American Ballet Theatre’s Accelerator Committee, which inspires cross-pollination between artwork, style, movie and choreography. She sits on the board of Art Production Fund, which curates and produces main public artwork tasks throughout the United States. Hoover is an creator and has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vanity Fair and Vogue.
YAGP is the biggest world community of dance. YAGP fulfills its mission of dance schooling by scholarship auditions, grasp courses, alumni providers, performances and schooling.
Over the previous 26 years, $5 million has been awarded in scholarships to the world’s main dance colleges, with as much as $500,000 now awarded yearly. Since YAGP’s founding in 1999, over 300,000 younger dancers – ages 9 to 19 – of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds have participated in YAGP’s worldwide workshops, audition courses and dance consciousness occasions.
This season, 15,000 proficient younger dancers from 86 international locations on 5 continents auditioned all around the world for a spot within the YAGP Finals. Many of these winners have the one-in-a-lifetime probability to share a stage with their idols, at this time’s largest ballet stars, on stage at Lincoln Center.
Five hundred YAGP alumni at the moment are dancing with 100 skilled firms all over the world, together with American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Boston Ballet, Stuttgart Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, The Royal Ballet, Mariinsky Ballet and lots of others. Over 100 of those alumni are soloists and principal dancers.
In 2019, in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, YAGP was the primary dance group to current completely digital programming, providing masterclasses and workshops in addition to digital auditions to finish the YAGP season.
In 2022, when the warfare in Ukraine started, YAGP labored rapidly to relocate dance college students from Ukraine and place them in YAGP accomplice colleges in Europe and the United States to soundly proceed their dance coaching. To date, YAGP’s Ukraine Relief marketing campaign has positioned over 200 dancers in security and on a path to an expert profession in dance.
In 2023, YAGP reinstated its Job Fair, now held bi-annually in Europe at The Stuttgart Ballet’s John Cranko School in Germany, and in America at Nashville Ballet.
In 2024, YAGP celebrated its 25th anniversary with a spectacular pageant of dance on the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. As a part of the anniversary celebrations, 353 younger dancers gathered at New York City’s iconic Plaza Hotel to set a Guinness World Record for “Most Dancers En Pointe,” and the United States Senate formally acknowledged YAGP as America’s National Youth Dance Competition.
For extra data, go to yagp.org/yagp-2025-gala.
