The Spirit Young Performers Company has announced the winners of The Stage Scholarship 2019.

Musical theatre company scholarships have been awarded to Daniel Moore, Alliyah Savannah-Chelsea Johnson and Molly-May Gibson. Daniel, who is 14 and comes from Derby, and Alliyah, who is 17, from Battersea in south London, have both won a 40% scholarship for the musical theatre company.

Daniel has been heavily involved with his local amateur theatre group in Derby as well as training with Stagecoach.

“I’d also done previous work with Spirit and after I finished my last show I kept pestering mum and dad to let me audition, even though it was quite far away,” he says.

Alliyah has been involved with musical theatre since the age of six.

“I’ve been on various part-time courses and performed with stuff at school but with Spirit I will be training every Sunday for five and a half hours,” she says. “I’m now also training at the Brit School in musical theatre, so it’s musical theatre seven days a week for me.”

Molly-May, aged 13, from Folkestone in Kent, has won a 20% scholarship for the musical theatre course. The young actor has already appeared in the West End and is enthusiastic about Spirit’s attitude to individual training.

“My mum is a dance teacher so I’ve been surrounded by performance for a long time,” she says. “I actually started at Spirit four years ago. The great thing is how supportive everybody is of your goals.”

For the dance company, the winners are Regan Garcia, Christianna Appiah, Lola Slavnich and Nadia Djilali. Each will receive a 20% scholarship, worth £3,120.

Lola, aged 15, from Essex, was really excited to win the award and has already been a student with Spirit for a few terms.

“When you first join, the teachers are so welcoming and hard-working. It’s a real homely place to be and the training is really consistent. We do a lot of group dancing in teams, but they look after us as individuals too.”

Spirit creative director Sophie Boyce was particularly impressed with this year’s winning line-up. “The talent on display at this year’s scholarship auditions was absolutely wonderful to see and created an incredibly difficult decision-making process for the Spirit team. We’re very excited for these deserving youngsters to begin or continue their training with Spirit and have no doubt that each of them has an extremely bright future ahead.”

spiritypc.co.uk

The Stage Scholarships 2019: Spirit Young Performers Company