LANCASTER, Wis. (AP) - Even Will Taylor was surprised how well things went on the Capitol Theater stage when he performed in the Overture Center’s “Rising Stars” talent competition last month. He wasn’t nervous. The music felt right.
And the young dancer did his job - at once thrilling and deeply moving his audience with a lyrical dance so beautiful and athletic that many in the theater were left stunned, the Wisconsin State Journal (https://bit.ly/2d9Nw8i ) reported.
With that performance, Will became the first dancer and youngest performer to win the grand prize of Overture’s “Rising Stars,” a competition designed to scout out unsung talent from across the region.
“It felt like a competition, but at the same time, I didn’t feel like it was a competition,” Will recalled in a recent interview. “It felt like something bigger than a competition. Maybe it was the type of talent. I’m used to going up against dancers, but not singers.
“I didn’t expect to win because there was so many other great talents.”
But Will didn’t hang out in Madison to celebrate his victory. He couldn’t wait to get home to jump on the backyard trampoline he’d just gotten for his 13th birthday.
There are not many 13-year-old male dancers in Will’s hometown of Lancaster - population 3,868 - certainly none as celebrated as Will.
The Saturday night he was named the top 2016 Rising Star - competing against many seasoned singers, dancers and instrumentalists twice his age - Lancaster residents’ Facebook pages lit up with the news. His family got home from Madison at 2 a.m. to find a family friend on the front porch with an armful of posters and congratulatory balloons. And at last weekend’s Harvest Festival Parade in Lancaster, people rushed up to the young dancer to shake his hand.
“I got some cards from people at school,” Will offered in a soft but cheerful voice. The cards said “’Nice job, Will,’ (and) ’We’re here to support you.’”
Will’s 16-year-old sister Sydney is a dancer, too; her clogging team “SAVED!” also performed in the Rising Star finals and brought down the house.
“Who knew there was a Lancaster, Wisconsin?” the Rising Stars emcee, Overture Center vice president of programming and community engagement Tim Sauers, said that night on stage. “And, man, can they dance down there!”
Brandi White Dreher can recite Sauers’ quote by heart. Dreher owns Lancaster’s Gotta Dance Academy of Performing Arts, and choreographed both Will’s lyrical dance number and the “SAVED!” piece. The two acts were selected from among 100 that initially auditioned for Rising Stars this summer; 25 made it to the finals.
Dreher grew up in a musical family in Lancaster and in high school performed with the statewide group Kids from Wisconsin. At Lawrence University in Appleton, she majored in biochemistry, intending to become a dentist. But after teaching at dance studios across the state, she got hooked.
She returned to her hometown and in 2011 opened Gotta Dance in a quaint turn-of-the century building, just up a flight of stairs from Lancaster’s town square. Sydney Taylor started taking dance lessons there. Soon, her 8-year-old brother Will got interested, too.
Will already had been teaching himself to dance in the living room of the Taylors’ large white Victorian. He mimicked dance videos on YouTube, and held dance “showdowns” with his sister and cousin Claudia. He taught himself gymnastics in the front yard, near a giant catalpa tree.
His older brother Mitchell was babysitting one summer when “I came home - and there was a mattress in my front yard,” said Will’s mother Andrea. “And Will says, ’Hey Mom, I can do a back flip!’ ’On this mattress?’ ’Yep, I just tried it. Mitchell let me,’” she recalled.
From there, Will “would practice aerials. It was just practice, practice,” his mother said. “When he wants to do something, he will just practice and practice it, and get it eventually.”
Will’s parents encouraged him to try sports, not only because Lancaster is such a big sports town, but because “he is such a good athlete,” his mother said.
But he took a break from the cross country team when, three days before the Rising Stars final, his foot swelled and he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to do his choreographed back flip on the Capitol Theater stage.
Most of Dreher’s students squeeze dance lessons in between practice for volleyball, wrestling, soccer, baseball or football. The Grant County city, surrounded by rolling cornfields and picturesque cow pastures, is “a really big sports community,” Dreher said, “and there’s not as much performing arts opportunities here. I wanted to try to give that opportunity to kids in this area - because it’s something that I thrived on growing up.”
Though she’s been teaching Will for five years, in that small-town way, Dreher has known his family “forever.” His dad and her brothers were good friends when they were boys, she said. Will first joined her hip hop class, but “within about a month, we were seeing some special things from him.”
“I asked him, ’What are your aspirations?’ and he said ’To be a professional dancer.’ To see a young boy say that, in a community where football reigns as king, it was very impressive that he had that kind of confidence.”
Will is a “sweet kid” with a fiery work ethic, his teacher said.
“He has a lot of natural talent. He’s very flexible and very strong. He had a smaller boy frame when he first came into our studio, but that tiny tyke could lift, could control his balance very easily, and had a natural ability to turn.” What’s more, he has “an ability to connect very well to music, where he can express his emotions.”
Though he trains with his teacher less than three hours a week, Will is a four-time regional champion and two-time national champion in his age group in the StarQuest and Showstoppers dance competitions.
In his Rising Stars piece set to The Lone Bellows song “Watch Over Us,” ’’We were all so impressed by how he commanded the stage,” said Rising Stars judge Jessica Lanius, also the artistic director of the movement-based theater company Theatre LILA.
“It’s a hard thing to do modern dance at that age, and he so connected with the movement and the storytelling,” she said. “His maturity, grace and passion really show.”
Will won a $250 prize for capturing first place in the youth dance category. And as grand prize winner, he’ll get a chance to perform again on the Overture stage. For starters, he’ll likely perform as part of the Vaudeville offerings before the Duck Soup Cinema shows slated for Feb. 18 in Capitol Theater.
He’s still a bit in disbelief, he said. Will speaks in awe of the talent he was up against for Rising Stars - such as the opening act, the adorable 6-year-old violinist Declan Killeen Toomey of Verona, or the closing act, the powerful Madison gospel singer Roderquita Moore.
“I didn’t think they’d call my name,” said Will, as he took a break from doing flips on his backyard trampoline with his 10-year-old brother Andrew. “But, I guess I got lucky.”
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Information from: Wisconsin State Journal, https://www.madison.com/wsj
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