ElliTe Studios dancers take to the world stage

Our extremely talented dancers, age 5-23, have qualified to represent Team England in a whopping 43 sections with pieces in a range of genres including Classical Ballet, Lyrical, Jazz, Tap, Contemporary, Acro and Showdance.

Here is some more information about the Dance school and World Cup from the Director of ElliTe Studios, Samantha Bell.

In 2023, our ElliTe Studios Dancers were successful in qualifying 39 pieces through to the Dance World Cup finals in Braga and returned home with 16 medals placing in Top 3 in the world, and 30 pieces placing Top 10 in the world! 3 Golds, 7 Silvers and 6 Bronze medals became our best results ever and every member of our team returned home with a medal.

''ElliTe Studios is a leading dance school in the centre of Wakefield where children age 3+ can learn to dance for fun/recreation or with aspirations to progress onto our vocational courses in preparation for pursuing a professional career in Musical Theatre, Dance, Choreography or Teaching. The school has been established in Wakefield City Centre for 15 years now and in that time we have had hundreds of young people use our training facilities, come along to our classes and learn life-long transferable skills that have launched them into successful careers both within this industry and beyond. Our successful graduation destination rate is exceptional. In 2018-19 we accomplished one of our biggest achievements yet by qualifying as the first ever Yorkshire based school to represent Team England in the Dance World Cup Finals in Portugal. This was a huge honour, especially when Team England went on to win the World Cup. We managed to capitalise on our success with ambitions to qualify again every year from 2020 to 2024 with an ever-increasing cast size of dancers.

''Following the rigorous audition and selection process, we were selected to represent the national team for all 4 subsequent years and our team of up to 44 dancers have since clinched a total of 13 Golds, 19 Silvers, 25 Bronze Medals and 2 Overall Outstanding Awards in the international finals. After forging the way in 2018-19, we were once again proud to be the largest ever Yorkshire based contributors to the World Cup winning England team. In 2023, the Dance World Cup was the greatest all-genre dance competition in the world with 66 participating countries and 7,500 finalist competitors, making it the second largest sporting event in the world, behind the Summer Olympics.

''The incredible news for 2024 is that we are hoping to do it all over again! Being able to provide such a prestigious international platform for so many Yorkshire based young dancers and former pupils (as choreographers) is really special and certainly newsworthy. It’s even more incredible when you consider that all of this has been achieved despite the challenges and disruption of the pandemic on young people’s education and training.''

The 2024 Finals are taking place in Prague from 27th June to 6th July.

If you would like to support the dancers in their fundraising here's the link to their Go Fund Me page, every single penny is very gratefully received: https://gofund.me/bd3635ce