Ballet

Dance This is Seattle Theatre Group's annual summer showcase at the Moore Theatre, running since 1999. Youth dance groups from across the greater Seattle region are invited to perform — International Ballet Academy was among the groups invited that year — and the program deliberately puts wildly different traditions on the same stage in one evening: ballet alongside hip hop, Afro-Brazilian, Tongan, Samoan, Chinese and Indian dance, among others.

This video is two parts. The first is the contemporary ensemble piece my group performed — low to the ground, and a departure from the classical repertoire I usually dance. The second is the company finale, when every group in the program comes onstage together; it ends with the dancers coming down off the stage and performing on the house floor among the audience.

At Youth America Grand Prix, the world's largest ballet scholarship competition, our twenty-one-dancer Giselle ensemble took 1st Place, Large Ensemble at the Seattle semi-finals (800+ entries) and advanced as an International Finalist, performing the excerpt at the Finals in Houston.

The Pas de Six is the Act I village celebration in Giselle, danced by the peasant corps before the ballet turns tragic — light, quick, and technically exposed, with the dancers in close unison and no scenery to hide behind. This duet is a section of that larger number, performed at Bellevue Classical Ballet's inaugural performance in 2026. I am the dancer on screen right.

The Russian variation — the Trepak — is the Act II divertissement built on folk-derived jumps and fast direction changes: big, percussive, and over in about a minute. International Ballet Academy stages The Nutcracker every December, and this was part of the 2024 production.

Dracula is a full-length narrative ballet, and the gypsy scene is its one burst of folk-flavored character dance — a large, fast company number in red, set against the village backdrop before the story darkens. This production is unique to International Ballet Academy: the choreography was created in-house, not restaged from another company's version. This was IBA's October 2024 production.