Multiple Dance Accolades for Year 7 Student Alyssia 25 May 2022

Year 7 student Alyssia Power has recently been accepted to the prestigious Mid Associate programme at the Royal Ballet School, alongside several other fantastic dance achievements.

The Royal Ballet Associate programme is designed to hone the abilities of exceptionally talented young dancers. There are four divisions for different age groups: Junior (to which Alyssia previously belonged), Mid, Senior and Advanced.

The Mid Associate programme has just 75 spaces available to the whole country and receives at least 1000 applications each year. Alyssia’s audition for this took place in Birmingham in November 2021 alongside 50 other students, a process which lasted more than an hour. Alyssia discovered she had been successful in April of this year, and she will now attend additional Saturday morning classes at Birmingham Royal Ballet Studios.

Alyssia was informed in May that she had also been successful in her two rounds of auditions to be part of the 2022 Residential Performance Company for the National Youth Ballet. The group will have an intensive two-week training period in August, before performing at the Crescent Theatre, Birmingham and Sadler’s Wells, London.

As well as these achievements, Alyssia has been asked to join the Academy of Balletic Arts from September. This is a vocational programme that offers further training to students who show potential for a career in ballet, run at the renowned Pineapple Dance Studios.

Alyssia began dancing at the age of three under the instruction of her mother, and currently dances five days a week at various classes. At BMS, she takes tap classes and is soon to start modern and jazz. In March, she performed in the Year 7-10 production of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, showing off her skills in a series of complex dance numbers.

Alyssia concluded: “I was over the moon to find out that I got into the Mid Associate Programme and the Residential Performance Company. The standard of the dancers at auditions was very high, especially at the final audition for the National Youth Ballet. I felt such a pump of energy and joy when I found out about both programmes, and I can’t wait to start.”

Head of Dance at BMS, Rachael Bradley-Smith, added: “Alyssia is a very talented and technical dancer and gets involved in every opportunity at school. We are all very proud of her.”