VIDEO EDIT: the 1st place winner of the senior male division, Martinho Lima Santos, is in fact from Portugal 🇵🇹. Thanks to those who’ve brought that to our attention. Congrats to Martinho from the ballet nerds 🎉
Ivana’s Esmerelda so impressed me. I’m not a dancer, I am a singer. And it has always bothered me that these women could not land the tambourine on the beat that girl had it down. She knew where her leg had to be at the moment of the beat perfect.
Ex-dancer, now singer/songwriter/ muso here. Agree 100%. Exquisitely performed! It takes a tremendous amount of control, strength, stamina and maturity to not let your emotions or excitement run away with you.
This must be a thing with singers. It's so distracting when dancers can't feel what to us is obvious and it can ruin an otherwise fabulous performance for me. Good on you Ivana!
It’s so great to see sass put behind Esmeralda! I have been watching and many variations are passive. I love sass!! The same with Raymonda. The claps of hands are passive, if any. I love sass, I love to hear the clap..
I want to say a massive shoutout crystal and ivanna for winning the senior division as first years. They are both only 15 and won against 19 year olds.
the pas de deux first place duo had sooo much chemistryyy i was like are they dating?? bc they're so cute together!! incredible synchronization and it felt like we were being told a love story
Ivana is now the blueprint for the La Esmeralda variation - as a musician I was incredibly impressed by her attack and rhythmic integrity. And the expression and artistry as a whole, incredible! That is how you do it!
Ivana's variation of La Esmeralda is by far the best one I've seen and at only 15 just blows my mind. I agree that tambourine kicks should be on the music and almost every variation that I've seen done has always been either behind the music or ahead of the music.
Those 53 minutes really flew by! Thank you for providing commentary on all of these beautiful dancers! Did you know my hometown-sharing Keenan Mentzos was a child actor? He is listed on imdb! 14 yo Keenan only started to focus exclusively on ballet at age 13! I loved all of the performances but my favourite girl is still Paloma Vidart (ARG) who won 2 prizes at Prix de Lausanne! Thank you very much for the video!! 🙏💜🎼🩰🌧🦌✨
Wow didn’t know that about Keenan! Such a talented young man. Paloma was stunning too ofc 😆😆. Thanks for watching, time flies when ur having fun ✨✨ And thank u!! 🎀🎀
I was wondering why the Lausanne winners were there, they already have scholarships and glory… but now I think they just wanted to perform for those wild crowds 😂
I haven't even finished watching the video but I just had to stop to comment on Ivana Radan's Esmeralda and Carson Willey doing the Nureyev Swan Lake variation. I've seen many mediocre Esmeraldas, a few really good ones, and then there's Ivana's. What I loved was the resistance and purpose to her movements, her ability to contrast motion with crisp moments of stillness, and the poised, almost haughty set to her head and neck. The Esmeraldas I've enjoyed so far have had great timing and almost a degree of cheekiness or naughtiness... but Ivana's had this "You think you deserve me? No, but you may worship me from a distance!" sort of grandeur that I found absolutely compelling. As for Carson... if that's where he's headed as a professional, with that ability to marry technical skill with such sincerity, with the feelings of the character he's embodying coming out through every sinuous stretch and sensitive little step, I'd be keen to see him dance for hours.
I was such a fan of martinho during the prix de lausanne and I‘m so happy he was rewarded with first place at yagp! so deserved! thank you guys for your spirited analyses
So happy to see Martinho again and doing so well. I LOVED the Korean pas de deux winners. She (Minjii?), in particular, was so charming and engaging. Thanks so much for giving us a taste of the best of the YAGP - your commentaries are always enlightening and entertaining.
Not Eden calling out my sitting in on a Saturday evening nerding out over Osipova in Giselle while stoned😂😂😂 I feel so seen! Girl how'd you know it was that one!
Kohina Nakatani - dancing the variation from Walpurgis Night - was stunning. She had perfect, crisp technique along with joyful musicality and effervescent presentation. Hers was easily my favorite performance of the entire YAGP.
In the last pdd shown, the male danseur made EVERY SINGLE lift look wait less! 🥹 I love how they dragged the music out along with their poses even tho the music was faster towards the beginning! The first passage of the pdd was my FAVORITE 😍! Thank you for another amazing video!!!❤
I love this video and i love you two!!! Please keep doing these reaction videos for YAGP/other competitions because we love hearing your thoughts on all the amazing young dancers🥰🥰
Thank you, so wonderful. Those poor kids having no music! And the audience trying to help was - not good. But so nicely tried . Beautiful audience participation. Ballet 🩰 is looking well for the future. It’s embarrassing, and I’m ashamed to say it but I had no idea this competition was so huge! Even Australia participates. Wow. Thank you girls. 🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🙏🙏👵🇦🇺
Oooh I LOVED the guy in that multi-colored outfit! He made such great expressions with his face! All I've seen other dancers do is either smile 😁or look very serious🧐 His facial expressions matched his clown-like costume. Was he playing a clown-like character? Ooh I loved ❤him. This is a very good episode of your snow today. Watching you two getting so excited over things us "Non-Ballet" folk even know WHAT we're looking at, makes it so fun. Watching you sometimes is miss fun than watching the dancers?😅
oh!! an almost hour long video, what a treat 😌😌 its great since im not familiar with yagp at all also u mentioned dorothée gilbert in ur video about the ballet techniques and styles, and i realised that it was her i had seen perform late last year!! i also found a 2h long tour of the opera garnier she did, talking to interviewer, and she seems like such a lovely person, i recommend u watch it, i think theres auto translated subtitles 👀👀 the series of interviews is called figaro la nuit, but the interview itself had her name in the title
so relieved the pas de deux winners didn't get their music cut out, eek. there ought to be some way to put a synchronized speaker out in front to take over even if just for the dancers when the hall speakers cut out loved this really long video, thank you! so many great artists i wouldn't see on my own
The difference in mentality regarding bringing back a variation here vs a program in figure skating is so interesting to me. Because in FS you have it for an entire year normally, sometimes 2. You can change it in the middle, but that isn't the norm. I was wondering why people were switching their variations. This makes a lot of sense.
Hannah Martin of the Birmingham Royal Ballet used to compete in rhythmic gymnastics for GBR! She has had a RU-vid channel for years. She has a video on the differences between RG and ballet. One of the big ones was that learning new choreography constantly and quickly was very difficult for her because in RG she would have one routine per apparatus per year, so that means 4 90-second-long routines practiced constantly. Another difficulty was that she had her RG coach who was always with her, which is common and even necessary in RG and artistic gymnastics (vault, beam, etc), but there is only 1 ballet teacher per a class of students/pros. Highly recommend the video and her channel “Hannah Martin RG”! ❤
Martinho! Thank you so much for watching our channel! We loved your performances and are so proud of you for your well-deserved 1st place🥇❤️ We are all cheering for you! 👏👏
I love your channel. You 2 are just adorable ! Your passion for your.. sport ? Is Ballet considered a "sport"? I don't know...I just love watching you two talking back and forth. You're so well spoken and entertaining. I should love to see one or both of you dancing one day. Thank you for teaching me SO many things I never knew about ballet before. I've been a dancer my whole life but I only spent 2 years in ballet as a little girl of 5 and 6. My dance teacher wanted so of us to learn ballet basics to help us with other styles of dance. I wanted a tutu my first day there!😅 ok.. I'm going back to watch the show. I loved learning the words in French. It made me feel "fancy"! I love your comentnrary as we watch different dancers. It's like two guys talking about football while all of us women are in the kitchen making snacks, drinking wine and laughing at the guys!😂🤣😅 Thank you❤
Martinho is actually from Portugal. His name is pronounced like “martiño” if you know how to use the spanish “ñ”. Thank you Eden and Jordan for putting subtitles, it helps a lot a non english native speaker like me 🎉
36:00 oh no their music cut out!!! that happened to a group of people at my ballet during an ensamble (and a really big one) and most of them were like 10-12 and they handled it (almost) perfectly and every one was so impressed
I love Ivana’s Esmeralda because of her musicality and actually hitting the tambourine. It gives me Sylvie Guillem Raymonda variation when she claps her hands and commits to the Hungarian undertones of Raymonda. 🇭🇺🩰👏🏻 22:04
YAGP finals is definitely an experience like no other from a lot of povs :)) the grand pas clasique people are my friends and yea it was pretty messed up, the guy just straight up paused the music and never played it again😤 we were super proud of them and we tried to clap on beat but we werent that many so you couldnt really hear it over all the screams and offbeat claps😢😂
I need to convince you that you need a personal assistant who travels with you to all these competitions (at the channel's expense)! Holy cow! Even the junior-level kids delivered professional level performances! Could not believe Ivana was 15! I wanted to add one thing on the Gamzattii variation: a lot of dancers not trained in Russia get "stuck" on those grands jetes that are traveling to corner 2 and in kind of a Russian 3rd arabesque position, but she just traveled. Could you possibly comment on how the judges weight the actual performances vs class work and coaching sessions and so on? What sorts of offers and scholarships did the winners get? And will you be doing Varna at some point? Wonderful video and commentary (as always)
Hi guys! Love your channel. Just wondering about something you said at @37:33 about the lack of music happening often (“not if, but when”) I can’t comprehend why that would be such a common occurrence? Why does the music cut out so often? Who is responsible for that? For such a major competition, it seems almost amateur-ish for that to be a regular occurrence. Especially with how critical the music is to the performances! It feels really unfair…
Ballet Comentators need to move over! I LOVE the excitement you brought to your run downs on each athlete. These artists make things look easy, so it is great to remind your audience of exactly why these things are so difficult. Ladies, you need to start practicing your whisper commenting during the actual performances so you can bring up the celebrations (and volume) at the end of their performances for when you get called up to the big leags 😁
ooh, so nice to wake up and see so many comments already. still have to do some work before i can watch this nice long video but looking forward to it!
actually! since we are watching YAGP! have you guys seen the movie about it? the first position? wouldnt it be fun to review all the dancers featured in the film and find out what are they doing now and how their career developed over the years or if they are still dancing? just a thought x
Wow Jolie! 13!? Crazy. Crystal is for sure gonna be one of the greats. She will be a very young principal/étoile. Geonhee Park is *chef's kiss* Still don't get how Melanie McIntire got first place last year. So much more talent available.
Melanie has never placed first at the finals. This year was her first time even making it to the 2nd round at finals. (She was very pleased about that and rightly so) Also, please don't put young dancers down like that. It's obnoxious.
Biologically, boys' puberty growth spurt is 2 years behind girls'. The growth spurt has ended or is close to ending for most girls in junior categories while junior boys are either before the start of the growth spurt, in the mids of, or at the end of the growth spurt. I think they should change the age range for junior boys..
Also how do judges account for the differences in training styles with these competitions? Or do dancers adhere to a specific style in competition regardless of how they’ve been training?
Dancers stay true to their individual training styles in as long as it’s cohesive with the style of the piece. The judges would have to judge the common denominators of the ballet techniques, the foundations of ballet are more often quite similar (turnout, foot articulation, placement, etc) 👍🏻👍🏻
I enjoyed this presentation very much, but I was concerned while I watched the 13-year-olds in the junior division. They danced very well, but I wondered is it really healthy for the 13-year-old girls to be dancing so much on point? Also, 13-and 14-year-old boys still have a lot of growing to do. They must have a lot of adjustments to make as their bodies grow and bulk up, don't they?
By the time they're 13 they've already been on point for at least 2 years. But most studios don't overdo it when they're young. In some countries like Russia and Korea they start them even sooner - which I agree is much too early.
