Missteps and moxie

NEW YORK - There were nerves, slips, wardrobe malfunctions, and two major falls. In the end, the 20 students from the Rock School for Dance Education won only two medals at the Youth America Grand Prix finals last weekend - which for the Rock meant a slow year.

But one of them was gold.

Esteban Hernandez, a 13-year-old phenom from Guadalajara, Mexico, won top honors among men in the junior division, for dancers ages 12 to 14. He was fresh off another gold-medal win, in the junior division of the International Student Ballet Competition in Havana. (He was only the second non-Cuban to win gold there; the first was his brother, Isaac.) He had also won the youth grand prix award in March at the YAGP regional semifinals in Swarthmore.

"I'm just really excited," Hernandez said after the awards ceremony and gala performance Monday night, holding a trophy that bore more than a passing resemblance to an Oscar.

After an uncharacteristically rough start in the contemporary round - including a hand on the floor after a series of pirouettes - that he chalked up to nerves, Hernandez came back in the classical portion with a variation from Diana and Acteon that included confident multiple pirouettes and high jumps. He also danced a strong Don Quixote in the final round.

"I was a little surprised" by the win, he said, "but the judges just saw what was really important."

Hernandez said that the Cuban win fulfilled his major goal of the year, but that YAGP was special because of its size.

A sort of olympics of ballet, the Youth America Grand Prix is the world's largest dance competition. Thousands of students compete in semifinals in 10 U.S. cities, as well as Brazil, Mexico, Japan and Italy. About 350 make it to the New York finals. This year, finalists came from 27 countries, as far away as Australia and Mongolia.

In the ensemble division, Skyler Lubin, 15, of Cherry Hill, and her noncompeting partner, Richard Hankes, 20, tied (with a duo from Italy's Il Balletto) for a bronze medal for their ebullient pas de deux, "Spring Waters."

While the Rock stars took home only two pieces of hardware, they did snag several of the more prized scholarships, including automatic placement in prominent competitions. The most impressive went to Sara Michelle Murawski, 16, of Virginia Beach, Va., who will be sent to the prestigious Prix de Lausanne competition in Switzerland next January.

Lawrence Rines, 17, of King of Prussia, won two scholarships: to the summer intensive program at American Ballet Theatre, and to the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School, ABT's year-round program. Previously accepted by the School of American Ballet, the New York City Ballet feeder school, he now has two top programs from which to choose.

Lubin was offered a spot in the Houston Ballet's Ben Stevenson Academy, and Hernandez won an all-expenses-paid trip to Berlin's Tanz–olymp competition.

Things did not begin smoothly for the Rock students at this year's New York round.

"I have three girls crying backstage," Rock codirector Stephanie Wolf Spassoff said after the juniors danced their contemporary variations on Thursday. " 'Now we'll never make the finals.' I told them, 'You're 14. You're beautiful dancers. There's next year.' "

Millis Faust of Bryn Mawr was one of those teary 14-year-olds, yet she made the most of her second chance, in the classical round, and was selected as one of just 20 junior women for the final round. There her Paquita variation, danced in a rosy pink tutu, was precise and neat - until the final seconds, when she fell facedown on stage.

But she was all smiles Monday night when she won two scholarships - to ABT's summer intensive and to England's Royal Ballet School.

That's why Spassoff and her husband, Rock codirector Bojan Spassoff, stress the process of training for the competition more than the performances or the results. (They had a busy week as well: In addition to coaching their students, Bojan Spassoff judged the precompetitive division and the final round, and his wife selected students for Rock scholarships, including four from Japan, one from Colombia, and several Americans.)

"I didn't think I was going to make it to the final round," said 18-year-old Kara Hanretty of Syracuse, N.Y., opining that competition performances "are never as good as you do it in the studio." Still, she not only made the finals, she also was offered a position in Ballet West II during the scholarship awards.

Hanretty, Rines, Taylor Stanley and Beckanne Sisk - all of whom also made the finals - started out on a high note when they were invited to take company class with ABT II on Thursday morning - although, as Stanley pointed out, that was pressure, too. "It was intimidating . . . and then some of the ABT principals came in!"

The Rock students found themselves doing pliés and arabesques alongside such major international stars as Jose Manuel Carreño, Marcelo Gomes, Maxim Beloserkovsky and Irina Dvorovenko.

Sixteen-year-old Stanley, of West Chester, danced well most of the week, but had problems near the end of his contemporary variation. "My shoe kind of came off," he said.

Sisk, 15, from Longview, Texas, suffered a wardrobe glitch too. In the middle of her classical variation from La Esmeralda, the strap on her tutu broke, and she lost focus. She went backstage and wept, sure she'd lost her chance at the finals. It turned out she hadn't, but her next - and better - performance didn't gain her a win.

Murawski had problems early. Hugging a pink unicorn her mother had bought her for luck, she said, "My contemporary had a lot of flubs." The classical went much better, and the audience oohed and ahhed when she held each position an extra fraction of a second - especially beautiful when done by a tall dancer.

But near the very end, pain in her Achilles tendon led to a slip, and "I was afraid I was going to fall offstage," she recalled Sunday over a lunch of soup and mangoes.

(About an hour later another Rock dancer, Alexandra Hartnett, 14, fell hard on her hands and knees in the middle of her classical variation in nearly the same spot on the stage.)

As Murawski lunched before Sunday's finals, her mother nervously encouraged her to drink some vegetable juice, eat an energy bar, and then take a nap that Murawski didn't think she needed.

"This is harder on me than it is on you," Michelene Murawski said.

But that night, things all came together for her daughter, who pulled it off - and won that precious spot in the Prix de Lausanne.