Self-taught dancer excels onstage

WASILLA — About a year ago, 12-year-old Juliana Wilson came across a YouTube video that would bring her to a stage she wasn’t sure she’d ever see.

Juliana, always on the lookout for new choreography online, found the 2013 “America’s Got Talent” audition of five preteen girls from Arizona last summer. It inspired her.

“These girls are really flexible and do these really amazing things and I was like, ‘whoa I wanna do that,’” Juliana said.

So she researched the group, found their choreographer, and watched their videos every day. Once she felt like she had mastered one move, she would go on to the next, and the next, until the dance was complete.

“At the time I didn’t even know if I was doing it correctly, I would just do it until I thought it was correct,” she said.

Juliana had of course been dancing in her living room and around her house for years, but until last summer, lacked the resources to pursue classes with a private instructor or in a professional studio. Her parents also weren’t sure, at first, if they wanted her to go down that path.

“We didn’t know if we wanted her to become a professional dancer because it’s very hard on the body,” said Tammy Wilson, Juliana’s mother.

But soon after Juliana walked into her first class at the Dancers Workshop of Wasilla last August, it was clear to her instructor, Regina Pilkus, that she wasn’t quite the beginner she looked like on paper.

“The first day Juliana Wilson walked into my lyrical class I knew I had a new student that exceeded the beginner level,” Pilkus wrote in a May press release. “She knew how to move, had flexibility and beautiful passion when she danced.”

But it was only weeks later that Pilkus actually asked Juliana where she had trained. Upon hearing that she hadn’t, Pilkus became even more excited about Juliana’s talent and determination, and worked to foster it.

“She not only has improved immensely in just one year, but works very hard in class, always fixes my corrections from week to week, and you can just tell how much she loves to dance. I am very proud of her and I look forward to being her teacher for years to come!” Pilkus wrote.

Juliana graced the stage for the very first time at the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts for the Dancers Workshop’s “World of Cinema” event May 29. She performed in “Freedom’s Heart,” which was choreographed by Pilkus and written, composed and sung by Dancers Workshop Administrator Sandi Bateson.

Juliana said she was “not nervous at all.”

“I didn’t panic, I was just doing what I love,” she said.

And the next day, the day of her second performance, she turned 12.

That weekend was the first time Dancers Workshop Artistic Director Farah Canale had really seen Juliana dance. Canale was impressed, Wilson said, and invited Juliana to participate in a three-week intensive workshop with the Anchorage Ballet. She would be practicing several different genres for 8 hours a day, five days a week.

Juliana was not able to attend all three weeks of the workshop, since her family had already planned a vacation to the East Coast, but she was glad to work with “other dancers that were kinda on my level,” she said.

Not that she was totally up to speed, however. Talented as she may be, Juliana is still learning dancer terminology.

“I wanted to quit (the workshop) at first because I didn’t think I was ever gonna catch up,” she said.

But she stuck with it, watching and learning by imitation and repetition when she didn’t understand the verbal directions. Eventually, the words started to make more sense to her.

Juliana is still learning, but plans to continue her classes and hopes to get more involved in musical theater.

“I really like portraying a character, that’s really fun for me,” she said.

But even a dance without words, song or explicit characters can bring out the emotion she loves to see in an audience, Juliana said.

“It’s something that makes me happy, and I love making other people feel something,” she said.

To see Juliana and others with the Dancers Workshop of Wasilla onstage, look for performance listings and updates online at facebook.com/DancersWorkshopAK or dancersworkshopak.org.

The Dancers Workshop is located at 960 S. Check St. in Wasilla.

Contact Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.