Once again, our small island of St. Martin proves to be big in the field of art! And again, we have to highly commend Clara Reyes and her Imbali Center for Dance and Creative Movement for it.
At the "Concours Fédération Régionale de Dance Guadeloupe 2011" - the Regional Dance Federation of Guadeloupe Competition 2011 - , which took place from April 19th to 22th, Imbali students performed brilliantly and took the first place in the two major performing categories. They ended up first in the Inter-Caribbean Dance Competition and first in the Open Compulsory competition. Furthermore, in the "Outre-Style" group category, Imbali won for African Dance and Modern Contemporary Dance. Solo winner in Outre-Style solo was Bharatanayam Neha Gidwani for Indian Dance, and the youngest, six year old competitor, Trinity Christina, took the first prize in African dance.
To crown those wonderful results, other St. Martin's young dancer made it to the top: 13 year old Diofanny Diaz won the first prize in Jazz Dance, and Jeremiah David, 10 years old, won the first prize in ballet, beating 27 other candidates in his age category .Eight year old Supernova Jno-Finn ended second in ballet.
14 youngsters had traveled from St. Martin to the competition in Guadeloupe. the prestigious panel of judges comprised some of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater School.
The two first prize winners in Jazz and Ballet qualified to compete in France in June at the Confédération Nationale de Dance against 2000 other competitors. The Imbali dancers also qualify to travel to Luxembourg in November for Euro Dance 2011.
Those fantastic results were the culmination of hard work by Clara Reyes and her students. On top of this, Clara fought very hard to raise funds in order to be able to send all those young dancers to Guadeloupe. Now, she has to fight again, this time to raise funds for her stars to go to compete in Paris and Luxembourg. If dance lovers among our readers wish to contribute, please, get in touch with imbalicenter@gmail.com and help some of our young dancers reach the stars!
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