Ballet Yuma receives multiple honors at RDA dance festival

Ballet Yuma recently received multiple honors at Regional Dance America’s annual Pacific Region Festival held last month in Las Vegas, Nev.

Each year the company attends the three-day festival where 22 companies from the Pacific region attend dance seminars, take classes from top professionals and receive honors for outstanding performances from the previous year.

This year Ballet Yuma was again designated Honor Company status from the RDA due to its continued excellence in dance education and performance over the course of the year.

“We are very pleased to receive Honor Status again from the RDA,” said Kathleen Sinclair, Ballet Yuma artistic director, “which means we are again in the top tier of performers.”

Individual honors were also awarded to three of Ballet Yuma’s dancers.

Andrea Hennig received the Monticello Emerging Choreographer Award, which is given to the best work by a new choreographer.

“Andrea has had a goal since she was 12 to choreograph a piece,” Sinclair said. “And she won an award with her first one, which was really great.”

Along with the award, Hennig received a full scholarship for RDA’s Craft of Choreography Intensive Summer Program at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

Other dancers who received scholarships at the festival were Jacey Sims, who will be attending the summer program at the Houston Ballet, and Alexis Sanford, who will attend RDA’s Intensive Choreography program in North Carolina this summer.

As for the future, Sinclair is preparing the company for next year’s national festival which will be held in Montreal, Canada.

“From now until next year, we will be getting everything ready for the national competition. It’s going to be a very exciting time since there will be over 100 groups competing and for most of our members it will be the first time they competed at the national level.”