Press Center
For Immediate Release
June 29, 2009
Media Contact: John Dakin
(970) 949-1999
AVON, Colorado—When the third, fourth and fifth graders at Avon Elementary School entered the Vail Valley Foundation’s “Celebrate the Beat” program last fall, little did they know that they would be taking their show on the road to an international audience.
But that is exactly what will happen July 3 when the students journey to Aspen to perform for the participants at the Aspen Ideas Festival. The Avon Elementary students will be joined by another Celebrate the Beat class from Crested Butte.
“This is a wonderful opportunity,” explained Damian Woetzel, director of the Vail International Dance Festival, “not only for the students, but for the overall Celebrate the Beat program. There are some extremely influential people that will witness this performance and I guarantee that they will be tremendously impressed with what they see.”
Celebrate the Beat was incorporated into the Vail International Dance Festival in 2007 via a one-week program that brought free movement and joy to the inaugural group of Vail Valley children. The program was added to the curriculum of Avon Elementary School in 2008 and at the beginning of 2009, a professionally trained teacher and musician moved to Eagle County in order to conduct Celebrate the Beat in several additional schools throughout the county.
Using the award-winning and inspirational National Dance Institute teaching techniques created by Jacques d’Amboise and his staff, classes are joyfully rigorous and participants need have no previous dance experience, with comfortable clothes and sneakers as the only requirements.
The fifth anniversary of the Aspen Ideas Festival will present substantive conversation across a variety of types of sessions, focusing specifically on “ideas that work”. Scheduled in three segments from June 29 through July 5 and hosted by the Aspen Institute, the four program tracks will include World Affairs and the Global Economy, Arts and Culture, Life in America and Managing Planet Earth. Presenters will contribute provocative perspectives from their fields, and discuss the world with a sophisticated audience highly motivated to engage in dialogue.
In addition to representing Celebrate the Beat, Woetzel will also be a speaker at the Ideas Festival, joining the likes of former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, former chairman of the Federal Reserve System Alan Greenspan and former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
The 2009 Vail International Dance Festival will showcase the third year of the “Celebrate the Beat” summer program July 27 through August 2, with the week-long workshop open to children ages 9 -11. Half-day classes will take place Monday through Friday at Avon Elementary School, concluding with a public performance at the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater on Sunday, August 2.
Limited space is still available for the Celebrate the Beat program during this summer’s Dance Festival. For further information or to register, please contact Jennifer Reid at the Vail Valley Foundation at (970) 949-1999 or jreid@vvf.org. The program is free of charge.
Celebrate the Beat and the Vail International Dance Festival are projects of the Vail Valley Foundation. For more information on Celebrate the Beat or the Dance Festival, visit www.vaildance.org. For additional information on the Foundation, check out www.vvf.org.
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