Keenan Kampa ~ photo by Gene Schiavone

Another stellar member of Dance Magazine’s top 25 for 2012, Keenan Kampa is a young ballerina from Oak Hill, VA with the limbs, legibility, and corporal freedom of the brilliant French dancer, Sylvie Guillem.  It is no wonder that Kampa was one of the first Americans asked to attend the Vaganova Ballet Academy in Russia as just a mere teenager.  The Vaganova Academy is where the great Mikhail Baryshnikov, among a bevy of other great ballet stars, was formed and nurtured.  With an 11-hour day of dancing and rehearsals, six days a week, the environment is designed to create racehorses out of the dancers that study there.

And Kampa is a racehorse.  After three years of training and dancing leading roles in Vaganova Academy’s student productions, Kampa moved on to the Boston Ballet where she is getting featured roles such as the “Queen of the Dryads” in Don Quixote, which she will perform at the Boston Opera House in the spring of 2012.

Kampa began her training at four years old and at her still young age, she is in the process of developing her true inner voice, which will surely deepen as she gains more life experience.  With a ripening of her delicacy and sweetness combined with an already fierce technique and natural ability, this ballerina is destined for greatness.