Focused on dance.

KELLY LYNN BURKE has studied dance for the past ten years; for nine of those years she has been attending competitions. At first she entered for fun and to gain experience performing. She still competes for those reasons, but these days she's also winning a lot of awards.

COMPETITIONS:

Last July Kelly won the Rhee Gold American Dance Award in Boston. The competition involved being observed for a week of classes in ballet, lyrical, jazz, tap, and acrobatic. She danced a solo to "Over the Rainbow," choreographed by Gina Forcella, director of Dance Stop in Parlin, New Jersey.

Winning the American Dance Award means that Kelly has the opportunity to perform in July at the 1996 Jazz Dance World Congress at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. This year she was also the high scorer at the Professional Dance Teachers Association (PDTA) competition and was among the top performers at the New York City Dance Alliance contest.

The competitions, according to Kelly, have become much more popular than they were when she first started attending. The level of performance is higher and many more choreographers, teachers, and directors attend.

"I feel competitions are helpful because they give you experience and you meet a lot of interesting people," Kelly says. "At the Rhee Gold competition the director of the Boston Ballet, Bruce Marks, was in the audience. I don't care about winning--I just want to go out there and dance, and try to get better every year. Some kids go out there just to win, but I think every time you see someone who's better than you, you want to go back and work harder to be able to do what they did."

THE TRAINING:

Every morning at 8:15 Kelly leaves her New Jersey home, takes a bus into Manhattan, and rides the subway to American Ballet Theatre's studios on lower Broadway. These she takes a class open to the public, which is often attended by company dancers. She is entranced by Julie Kent and awed by Angel Corella's multiple pirouettes. This year American Ballet Theatre is inaugurating a special summer course. Only one hundred students will be chosen to participate; Kelly hopes to be one of them.

After class, if a door is open to a studio where a rehearsal is going on, Kelly likes to peek in the doorway--it's a doorway she is working hard to enter. In addition to the class at ABT, she often rides the subway uptown to take a jazz class at Steps on Broadway. Sometimes she takes another ballet class with Finis Jhung before heading back to New Jersey.

"My mom packs something for me to eat when she picks me up at the bus station to take me to evening classes at Dance Stop." says Kelly. "I take two classes: one ballet and the other jazz or pointe or tap. I don't get home until 9:30 at night. It's a long day, but I really like it. My teacher, Gina Forcella, is like my second mom. She's trained me from the beginning."

THE GOAL:

Kelly's goal is to join a professional ballet company. She is aware that there are a lot of eighteen-year-olds with the same dream, so she is working hard to make it come true. She feels that even if it doesn't, the competitions have opened up options for dancing on Broadway or in other shows. They have given her exposure to many people in different areas of the dance world.

The passion to dance has come entirely from Kelly, but her family has been very supportive. Her father, a hotel manager, transferred to a night shift last year so that he could drive his daughter into New York for daily classes. Now that she travels in by bus, he is planning to switch back to more convenient daytime hours.

Kelly, obviously a prize pupil, says, "It's not that I think I'm the best student at Dance Stop, but I am the most serious. I give up a lot to do this. I think others in the studio would like to be professional dancers, but they have other things in their lives. Right now, everything in my life is focused on dance."