Interview: Princess Grace Academy’s Luca Branca (Winner of the 2022 Prix de Lausanne Young Creation Award) and Morgan Johnson
Luca Branca (18) and Morgan Johnson (13) are both students at the Princess Grace Academy, a highly selective dance academy for aspiring dancers in Monte Carlo established by the legendary ballet teacher Marika Besobrasvoa in 1975. TWoA talked to Luca and Morgan about their passion for dance and choreography, their dance video “Let Your Smile Shine,” and Luca’s success as an aspiring choreographer at the prestigious Prix de Lausanne.
Morgan and Luca both left their home countries to pursue their passion for dance. Morgan is originally from a small town in Minnesota. Luca Masala, artistic director at the Princess Grace Academy, spotted her at the finals of the 2021 Youth America Grand Prix (YAGP) and invited her to join the Academy as one of its youngest students. She is now in her second year: “I love it so much here, I am continuing to learn so much and to grow as a person and as a dancer, to grow both in my contemporary and classical. It’s incredible what they do here.” Luca, who is in his final year at the Academy, joined the Princess Grace Academy in 2018 when he was fourteen. He is from Lissone, a small town close to Milan in Italy: “Once I entered the Academy, I understood even more how important dance is for me, and how much knowledge I can get from dance not just about dance, but also about many other forms of art, which I think is really important for dancers. I guess the arts in general are a collaboration between different forms of art. In this place, they give you this knowledge, they teach you and they make you grow as a dancer and also as a person. I really fell in love with this place. I think I can also speak for Morgan: this is a second home for us.” The students come from all over the world and follow distance learning curricula of their home countries. Neither Morgan nor Luca miss going to a regular school. They feel privileged to study in a place that allows them to focus on their professional goals. As Morgan puts it: “Everyone around us here gets you and gets the passion, they have the same passion. They all get what you are going through, everyone is here to support you.”
But the path leading to the stage can sometimes be a tough one. Aspiring dancers often have to cope with challenging situations. For Luca and Morgan, this has already become second nature. According to Luca: “If you really want to do this, it’s because it’s a passion for you, so you always push through, you always get through these hard moments. These hard moments help us to get better or to understand that hard or sad moments are also part of ‘normal’ life. It’s something that you have to learn to deal with.” Morgan agrees: “There are definitely some hard moments, but I always think of my main goal to become a professional dancer and that always helps me to push through. I always remember my passion for dancing and those hard moments help you to see a different side of things. They are always going to be there, so you have to know how to get through them.“ Morgan likes to think of favourite roles to keep inspired: “I would love to be Odette and Odile in Swan Lake, I just think that it is so amazing how you can take a normal person and become a beautiful swan. I would also love to be Giselle one day, I think it is so amazing how she changes, she is so happy and then she has this mad scene and you see a whole different side of her.”
Luca’s particular passion is contemporary dance: “What inspires me the most in contemporary dance is how you can see your body transform in many different ways. You could be really long, or really neo-classical almost, and then you could be really deformed, something really strange and almost twisted. This gives me this sensation: I want to know more, I want to see where my limit is, where my shoulder can go, where I can reach with the movement. And of course, I get inspired from beautiful movers, there are certain dancers in contemporary dance where I ask myself - how can they do this, how can they be so - - - it’s almost unexplainable - - - and I want to try, I want to see if I can create a new movement or something like this. This is what gives me this little fire inside when I think of contemporary.”
Luca is also an aspiring choreographer. As soon as he arrived at the Academy, he started taking classes in dance composition and quickly managed to grab his teacher’s attention: “At the beginning, he usually asks you to do something to surprise him. I went around the studio with the garbage bin and then the garbage turned into my son, and I was just walking around, caressing my garbage in front of the director. It was really awkward, because it was my first year, so I didn’t really have a relationship with him. I thought everyone took me for a crazy person.” Luca continued taking composition classes; his choreographic talent started to attract attention.
In September 2021, the Academy’s director called him into his office: “As soon as I saw the Prix de Lausanne on the screen of his computer, I felt there was going to be something about contemporary and then he explained this project to me, and I was really, really happy and said that of course I wanted to do this.” The Prix de Lausanne is arguably the most prestigious international ballet competition for young dancers. It is open to dancers aged 15 to 18 years old and offers its winners scholarships to the most prestigious international ballet schools and companies. In 2021, the Prix de Lausanne established the Young Creation Award to talent scout young choreographers. It is open to ballet students from the Prix de Lausanne partner schools and companies. Five candidates are selected by video to present their choreographies at the Prix de Lausanne’s final. The jury selects two winners. The two winning choreographies become part of the Prix de Lausanne’s contemporary variation repertory for the following year’s competition. The young choreographers get invited to coach their variation during the following Prix de Lausanne if their variation gets chosen by a candidate.
Luca had already started working on his choreography for the Young Creation Award when the Academy’s director approached him with another opportunity: a choreographic Instagram challenge on the theme “Let Your Smile Shine” by the Angel Shine Foundation, a New York-based charity providing scholarships to young dancers. The Foundation posts several dance challenges throughout the year: participants are asked to submit a one-minute video on the theme of the challenge, the foundation’s board selects three finalists and the public votes on the winner, who is awarded a scholarship. Even though his schedule was packed, Luca was excited about another opportunity to flex his choreographic muscle.
He started thinking: “I thought, whom can I use, who has a beautiful smile, all these kinds of things, and then I thought, well, Morgan is really young, she’s really cute, she has a beautiful smile, a contagious smile I would say, you just see her smile and you want to smile - and I thought, it’s perfect!” For Morgan, it was a huge surprise when she realised that Luca had chosen her as his dancer: it was the beginning of the school year and they had only talked a few times: ““It was my first year and when Luca chose me, I was really surprised and very honoured. It was really nice; he would choreograph a few things and we would try filming and we would add the music. We would do different movements that would make me smile also. It was really amazing being able to put myself into these movements and show who I really am.”
The video is only one minute long, but after watching it, you feel you know Morgan. The choreography sits so naturally on her that it looks like a spontaneous, joyful improvisation. Luca explains how he works: “When I create for someone, of course I have the base of my style, but I always try to see how the dancer is taking the quality of the movement, how he eats my movement. From there I say, ok, maybe try to do this in a different way, try to feel this sensation, and then I see: this is the right movement for you, this is really natural on you, so you will look good, and you will look like it’s you. With Morgan it was really easy for me because she already has this nice quality, she has really nice movements, so I would say, try this, maybe try it a bit softer, and then it was already what I was searching for.” For Morgan, it was the first time that someone was creating a choreography on her: “It was so amazing to have someone work with me, especially Luca, I love his choreography. He would give me a movement, I would try to do it and I think I would just naturally add my own little flair to it, I guess. Then he would give me a little suggestion and it would make everything flow and work together.”
Luca filmed Morgan on his iPhone and used iMovie to edit the different clips into the finished product. Morgan has a different hair style in every clip, starting with two playful buns on the side of her head and ending with exuberantly open hair. Luca asked Morgan to suggest her own dress: “Luca just told me to find something fun that represented me. I have this dress, one of my favourites, it had kind of become a lucky dress: I found out that I was invited here wearing that dress, and I decided to wear it.” The project took the two of them just a week – and they won the challenge.
Luca Branca and Morgan Johnson, “Let Your Smile Shine” challenge, Angel Shine Foundation
Next, Luca focused on his piece for the Prix de Lausanne. For Luca, his experience at the Prix de Lausanne felt like a big door opening. He will start his life as a professional dancer soon, but the Prix made him realise that he would also like to become a choreographer: “At the Prix de Lausanne, everyone sees you, I felt I’m starting to walk down this path also as a young choreographer.” As one of the five finalists, Luca and Yo Nakajima (the Princess Grace Academy student on whom he created his piece) went to Lausanne for the week of the competition to work with teachers coaching for the Prix. Half-way through the week, Yo performed Luca’s piece for the jury and a closed public consisting mainly of the dancers competing in the competition. Every piece running for the Young Creation Award was performed twice to allow the jury a proper chance to evaluate each creation.
Luca also had to present his piece, “Les Ombres du Temps” (“The Shadows of Time,” to a commissioned piece of music by Vincent Isler) to the jury. Nervous about making a mistake in his presentation, he would repeat his short speech over and over to himself, even sending an audio recording of it to his director to make sure that his English was accurate. His piece is about a young person feeling stuck in life and without inspiration. But slowly, the young person realises that by searching inside themselves, they can rediscover their own freedom, a fresh vibe, happiness and inspiration.
Yo Nakajima (Princess Grace Academy; now with Semperoper Ballet, Dresden) in Luca Branca’s “Les Ombres du Temps.” Excerpt from a rehearsal video.
While watching Yo perform his piece for the jury, Luca felt “every single step she was doing. I felt as if I was doing it with her, or as if I was on stage behind her doing it with her. My body was kind of stiff because I was really nervous, but at the same time my soul was on stage with her, dancing at the same time.” When he heard his name announced as one of the two winners, he had a blackout: “I just remember myself, I couldn’t stop smiling, and there was Yo, saying, ‘ok, Luca, let’s go, we have to go,’ I said ‘ok,’ but I didn’t understand anything.” When he went down from the stage, a group of Princess Grace Academy students was waiting for him. One after the other hugged him: “It was just a moment of full happiness, realising that I managed to arrive at that point, to present myself as a young choreographer, I’m glad our director gave me the chance to participate.”
Luca’s advice for teenagers interested in choreography: “If you feel you have a voice inside of you saying, ‘I want to create,’ just go for it. It can be just movements, or you might want to start from an idea or a story and create movements, or any other way to start creating something. If you have it inside, it’s important to bring it out, because I think nowadays, maybe after Covid, I feel dance is not as important everywhere as it was before. If you want to create something, start to create, because we will never again have a Marius Petipa, or Martha Graham, we need to go on and so if you are young - you have all your life to start choreographing, to find your voice, to find your movements, to get inspired from other choreographers. Go for it. Just try, worst, you don’t like what you did, nothing can go wrong, in the end, it is a work of art, and I think art is neither right nor wrong, nor beautiful or not beautiful, it is really subjective - there is never wrong or bad.”
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