Ballet finalist Steven Morse. Photo by Jack Hartin

The Los Angeles Music Center Spotlight Awards is one of this country’s premiere competitions for youth artists, attracting talented teens from Ventura to San Diego. Orange County students do well year after year in the two dance categories, classical and non-classical. Past Spotlight winners including Toshiro Abbley and Quenby Hersh. This year it will be an all-Orange County match-up in the ballet category. The two finalists are Huntington Beach’s Bryn Gilbert, who studies with Salwa Rizkalla at Southland Ballet Academy, and Steven Morse, of Garden Grove who goes to Charles Maple’s Conservatory of Dance. Nathan Trasoras, an 11th grader at the Orange County High School of the Arts, is a finalist in non-classical dance.

Finalists in the jazz and classical instrumental categories will be named early next month. All 12 finalists in six categories perform before a packed house at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on April 26 and the winners are announced immediately. “American Idol” is a snooze by comparison. 

Turn the page, so to speak, to see a photo of Bryn and all the students from Southland Ballet Academy who were Spotlight semi-finalists.

That’s Salwa holding the flowers. The girls are (from left to right): Sareen Tchekmedian, Renee Kester, Ellen Akashi, Megan Yamashita, Bryn Gilbert, Salwa, Olivia Hayward, and Jamie Kopit. Photo by Dave Friedman.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Dance by Register arts staff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.