If you go
› What: Dance Alive/Elite performance.› When: 6 p.m. Friday, July 22.› Where: UTC Fine Arts Center, 752 Vine St.› Admission: Free.› Phone: 423-821-2055.
About the visiting artists
* Samantha Shelton is ballet professor at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Mich., and has performed with or choreographed for professional companies across the country. In May 2012, she spent three weeks in Taiwan, teaching and presenting a piece of choreography for National University of Tainan.* Marlayna Locklear is in her eighth season with the Dayton (Ohio) Contemporary Dance Company. She teaches and choreographs at universities around the nation and is founder/director of Indurance Dance Intensive.* Mark Burns began his dance training at age 8 in New York City with the Harlem Children’s Theater. He made his Broadway debut two years later as a dancer and vocalist in the “The Magic Talisman.” At 11, he received a full scholarship to the Joffrey Ballet, and at 16 he received a full scholarship to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. After graduating from NYU, he received apprenticeships from Miami City Ballet and Dance Theater of Harlem. He currently works with Collage Dance Collective, Roswell Dance Theater and is a master instructor at the Tolbert Yilmaz School of Dance in Georgia.* Brian Gephart is a professional dancer who received ballet training from North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, Houston Ballet II and Ballet Tennessee.
For the past two weeks, children from Chattanooga recreation centers have been learning fundamentals of ballet in free lessons taught by Ballet Tennessee’s Dance Alive program.
These dancers will join with intermediate and advanced students in Ballet Tennessee’s Summer Intensive for a free public performance Friday night, July 22, in the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Fine Arts Center. It’s a show-and-tell performance of what the 8- to 12-year-olds in Dance Alive have learned; and it’s a recital for the company’s more advanced dancers, many of whom got their start in Dance Alive.
Dance Alive is an introductory dance program taught through a partnership between Ballet Tennessee and the Chattanooga Department of Youth and Family Development. Auditions are held for interested children in area rec centers in June. Those selected are transported from their centers for two hours of dance and choreography instruction, Monday through Friday for two weeks, at Ballet Tennessee in the John A. Patten Recreation Center in Lookout Valley. The children are encouraged to be creative, and sometimes their ideas are incorporated into the choreography they learn.