Ashburn dance studio ranked third in nation
It’s late afternoon on a weekday, and Studio Bleu Dance Center in Ashburn is bustling. In one pink-walled studio, eight girls in leotards watch their ballet instructor carefully as she demonstrates a sequence of steps. A few doors down, a co-ed group of younger children, ages 5 to 7, are in the middle of a jazz technique class. Near the lobby, kids are lined up along a wall to help each other with homework as the flow of new arrivals through the front doors continues.
“There’s a lot going on!” studio owner Kimberly Rishi says, in something of an understatement. Dancers at the studio are preparing to perform at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York next month and have been invited to the next year’s Summer Olympics in London. More than 2,100 students — competitive and recreational — attend more than 300 classes every week at the dance center, which announced this month that it has been ranked third on a list of top studios in the United States by the Federation of Dance Competitions.
The ranking was the first time the studio had been recognized by the federation, Rishi said. Studio Bleu also won the federation’s Studio Excellence Award, presented this year to 13 studios nationally.
Michelle Kresge, vice president of the Federation of Dance Competitions, said Studio Bleu was awarded the rank based on its competitive dance team’s performance at a number of local and national competitions.
“They had a lot of winning routines,” Kresge said. “They’re a very high-quality, highly recognized studio in the nation.”
The Studio Bleu dance team is unique for a couple of reasons, Rishi said. The 250-member team, with dancers from from 3 to 18 years old, is the largest in the country; and any dancer at the studio can be a part of it.
“This is not a competitive studio within,” Rishi said. Students who want to join the competitive team go through a kind of mock audition, she said. They perform for judges so they can have that experience, but any dancer can join the group.
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David Hallberg, 29, a native of Rapid City, S.D., is the first American ever to be named a principal dancer at the Bolshoi Ballet .
He arrived in Moscow two weeks ago and was given an apartment a few steps from the theater. He has, he says, “no social life to speak of” — just his work and a book he is reading — and is still struggling with jet lag. On Friday, he will make his debut at the Bolshoi Theater as Albrecht in“Giselle.”
Over Mr. Hallberg’s first year at the Bolshoi,The New York Times plans to check in with him regularly. Mr. Hallberg sat down earlier this week with our Moscow bureau chief, Ellen Barry, in the glossy Vogue Café around the corner from the theater. Here, edited and condensed, is some of their conversation.
Debuts are never my best performances, to be honest, because there’s a lot of external energy going on. A lot of people wishing you good luck. A lot of expectations. A lot of nerves. Not really nerves in a very useful way, I find — it’s a lot of wasted energy. My better performances are always really after debuts. The second, third, fourth show of something.
I’ve performed at the Bolshoi before, I’ve danced in galas here. I’ve been to Moscow many times, but this is the first time, you know, I’m like a permanent fixture. I’ve always wondered whether they know what they’re getting themselves into. Whether they have even seen me dance enough to know what kind of a dancer I am.
I do feel a sense of responsibility as a foreigner, really. But the audiences here know me a little bit, and I have felt a sense of warmth from the Russian audiences already, which is nice. You become a part of its history and you know its importance. So, yeah, I think it goes beyond borders of being a foreigner or being a Russian. It’s just that when you’re a part of the Bolshoi you feel a sense of pride.
I will never be a Bolshoi dancer. And I think that’s part of the — that was part of the offer. That they’re bringing someone in who has a different view on things. But I will have hopefully picked up some of the Bolshoi style. But again I have another style that I can’t get rid of — I can’t shed. So I’ll have a mixture, which is totally fascinating to me.