PT: What would you consider to be key essentials for a ballet performer? 

Junxiong Zhao: I think it is musicality, flexibility, and coordination.

Lia Cirio: I believe it’s a drive – to work hard, to want this career – because it’s difficult. A soul – to project different roles and project the feeling of the piece.

Katherine Barkman: A typical day would be composed of a class, followed by rehearsals for whatever you’re going to perform. The things that are important to me as a dancer would be dedication – you have to be really dedicated to be a dancer because you have to go through the same things every single day. Passion – which follows the former, you really have to love what you do. And lastly, is a sense of selflessness. It’s important you realise the responsibility that you have to share your art on stage. It’s bigger than just yourself.

PT: What made you fall in love with ballet in the first place?

Jared Matthews: I personally didn’t like ballet. I started as a tap dancer, so I wanted to go that route. I was very influenced by Gene Kelly and for me, that was the thing to do – more Broadway and show tunes. But I was told to do ballet to make my tap better.

So when I started doing ballet, and saw the film Turning Point (1977) and watched [Mikhail] Baryshnikov, then I realised what a male ballet dancer can be. That was when I changed my trajectory. Even to this day I still love tap. Whenever I see a tap number, it inspires me to be a better ballet dancer.

Yuriko Kajiya: When I started, just like Jared, I didn’t like ballet very much. I’m from Japan and at age 10, I moved to China and joined a Shanghai dance school – I still didn’t like ballet at that point. It took my around three years to like it.

As a child, I think I liked that fact that after practice you get a reward from your teacher, based on how much you improved. That made me want to practice more, and by doing that, I just started to draw into dancing. So since then, I just loved it.

PT: For the young audiences of today – who are often engrossed in digital media/ entertainment – do you have any tips as to how a young person would enjoy ballet or how you would encourage them to watch a ballet performance?

Lisa Macuja-Elizalde: First of all, what a young person engaging in social media should know about ballet is that… right now, with all this Instagram and Youtube videos, ballet is just about doing multiple pirouettes or doing a beautiful pose underneath a tree. That’s what young people think ballet is all about, but it’s not, it’s an art form.

You train your body from a very young age in order to create the lines, to dance and move to the music, to make it easy and light. Young people shouldn’t be confused about what ballet is. They should go to a performance as opposed to simply watching videos online. A lot of dances today are from competitions and people forget that these are variations from a story ballet.

Again, it is an art form, a storytelling on-stage. It is movement to music, it is the epitome of all the performing and visual arts in one stage.

You get the work of visual artists, choreography, composers, musicians, lighting designers, you get the vision of the artistic director, and you get all these individual magical performances from dancers who bring in their own years of experience and training into one performance.

George Birkadze: If I may add something… if you think about the ballet, you go to Europe, all ballet companies are royal. In England, you have the Royal Ballet of Flanders. If you go to Russia, it is always royal – it’s a top art. Before people didn’t have DVD or internet, so that [ballet] was the entertainment – to see stories – it was the Hollywood, the movies. My point is that art changed a little bit, but the concept of the story and the magic of the performance is very royal and high level. That’s why kings want to watch it, and we are still trying to conserve that.

You have to think that a ballet is an antique form. People go to museums… they can also go here and see how the ballet has progressed. You can see the same composition performed differently across time, it is truly entertaining. So, it’s not just something as simple as a dance. The value of a [ballet] dancer it not just technique, he has to be an artist, an actor. It’s not just coordination – interpretation is important – it’s how you live your role on stage. That should be interesting for young audiences to see in life [and not simply, on screen].

The American Stars Gala is directed by Lisa Macuja-Elizalde and George Birkadze. The performance features Boston Ballet’s Lia Cirio and Junxiong Zhao, Houston Ballet’s Yuriko Kajiya and Jared Matthews, and guest artists, Joseph Philips and Katherine Barkman.

To know more about the performances by Ballet Manila, you can visit: balletmanila.com.ph or follow them on Instragram: @balletmanila. Click here to know more about the Boston Ballet and the Houston Ballet.