Previous Participants
The USA IBC has accelerated the careers of many dancers including Jose Manuel Carreño (1990), Nina Ananiashvili (1986), Vadim Pisarev (1986), Andris Liepa (1986), Daniel Meja (1986), Rasta Thomas (1998), Vladimir Malakhov (1990), Irina Dvorovenko (1990), Daniil Simkin (2006), Misa Kuranaga (2006), Sara Webb (2002), Katia Carranza (2002), Anna Antonicheva (1998), Yury & Zenaida Yanowsky (1994), Johan Kobborg (1994), April & Simon Ball (1994), Luis Serrano (1998), Dai Sasaki (1994), Edward Stierle (1986), Li Cunxin (1982) and Katherine Healy (1982).
Jury members have included Robert Joffrey, Yuri Grigorovich, Bruce Marks, Sophia Golovkina, Alexander Grant, Vera Kirova, Ivan Nagy, Laura Alonso, Vladimir Vasiliev, Yvette Chauvrire and Nina Novak.
Li Cunxin (senior men's silver medal in 1982) wrote a memoir Mao's Last Dancer that was a best seller in Australia and the United Kingdom. It includes his account of the competition in Jackson where he was not allowed to compete as a Chinese citizen because of his recent defection to the US. He also discusses the intrigue around the defection of Chinese dancer Lin Jianwei during the competition that year. A movie based on the book was released in 2009. Today Li lives with his family in Melbourne, Australia.
The first gold medalist at a USA IBC was Lubomir Kafka from Czechoslovakia in 1979. The first US representative to win a gold medal was Janie Parker with the Houston Ballet in 1982. The only medalist from the IBC's home town of Jackson was Kathy Thibodeaux in 1982.
Numerous dancers have participated in multiple USA IBCs but only Pierre Quinn from Bluffers Park in Canada has won medals in different IBCs — junior silver in 1982 and senior silver in 1990. Simon Ball came close when he won a Jury award as a junior in 1990 and won the gold medal as a junior in 1994.
A number of brother-sister pairs have been in the competition. The most successful was Yury and Zenaida Yanowsky (Spain, 1994, silver and gold respectively). April and Simon Ball (USA) also won awards as a brother-sister pair that same year.
Notable sisters have also passed through the IBC including Jennifer and Lauren Gelfand (USA, 1986 and 1990 respectively) and Adrienne and Ashley Canterna (USA, 1998 and 2002). Brothers Zoltan and Tamas Solymosi (Hungary, 1986 and 1990) went on to dance at the Royal Ballet in London and the American Ballet Theater, respectively. Another pair of brothers were Isaac Hernandez from Mexico who won a Senior Gold medal in 2006 and Esteban Hernandez with a Junior Jury Award of Encouragement in 2010.
The 2010 competition brought us the first father-son participants with Andrei Pisarev of the Ukraine who is the son of Vadim Pisarev that won a Gold medal for the USSR in 1986.
Read more about this topic: USA International Ballet Competition
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