Winterfest Puts 10 Talented Seniors in the Spotlight

For 17-year-old Jessica D. Vallot, dance is everything. What she eats, when she sleeps and how she spends her time are dictated by her love of dance.

“I just recently learned how to dance to my fullest. To push myself. It’s really hard and there will be days when I don’t want to dance, but I wouldn’t give up what I’m having right now for a social life,” said Vallot, a senior at Los Angeles County High School for the Arts.

Vallot is one of 10 high school seniors selected as finalists--from more than 250 entrants--who will perform Monday at 7:30 p.m. in the Music Center’s Winterfest Spotlight Award Competition at the Pavilion.

The students, backed by Doc Severinsen and a 30-piece orchestra, will vie for four $5,000 scholarships, donated by Johnny Carson, in a talent competition sponsored by the Pacific Telesis Foundation.

Although only one in each category--dance, two-person drama, vocal and instrumental music--will be chosen for the top awards, the remaining finalists will each receive $1,000 scholarships given by the Peter S. Bing family, Finnegan Pinchuk Co. and the National Art Assn., said Joan Boyett, director of the Music Center’s education division.

A celebrity panel will judge the students on talent, creativity and audience rapport, Boyett said.

The judges are Gerald Arpino, Jack Elliott, Jean Firstenberg, Peter Hemmings, Stanley Holden, Paula Kelly, Monica Lewis, Bella Lewitzky, Karl Malden, Henry Mancini, Walter Mirisch, Gene Nelson, David Rose, Lalo Schifrin, Constance Towers, Jane Morgan Weintraub, Sidney Weiss and Richard and Lili Zanuck.

Vallot, who began dancing six years ago, practices her barefoot technique two to three hours each day. She’ll perform a modern dance choreographed especially for the competition to Barbra Streisand’s “A Piece of the Sky,” from “Yentl.”

It’s a piece, Vallot said, that requires her to interpret with her emotions what the lyrics are asking: Why can’t someone go as far as she can in life; why are there obstacles in the way because of who you are?

“My dancing comes from inside. It’s all feelings. I can’t dance without an emotion to think about. I can’t move without that,” she said.

Instrumental finalist Haldan Martinson, 17, said he strives to listen to himself more critically.

“Everything is hard for me because I want to be good,” said the violinist, a senior at Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica. “I’m usually never satisfied.”

But, he said, “One of the things that I’ve done in the past year is listen to myself, especially in intonation. Not listening to myself was probably hindering me before.”

Martinson is a fan of Bach and Mozart, because, he said, “they are so transparent. You feel naked when you play it. The technique isn’t hard, but the style you play with, that’s a real challenge.”

As for Romantic music, which he also likes, Martinson said, it’s easier with its sweeping melodies, more complicated and richer texture. “But you’re not so exposed; it’s a little more mooshy-gooshy,” he said.

Martinson began studying violin when he was 8. He spends two hours a day practicing during the school year, upping practice to five hours a day in summer. He plans to continue his musical studies at college.

The piece he and his music teacher selected for his presentation at the Music Center is Henri Wieniawski’s “Polonaise Brillante” in D Major, Opus 4, for violin and piano. It’s a piece, he said, that’s been in his repertory a long time, is short and best demonstrates his ability.

“It’s flashy,” he said.

Vocalist Cristin Denise Mortenson’s 5-minute performance at Winterfest is the culmination of 6 hours of daily practice over 10 years.

“My whole being is music and my love for my art and performing. It’s like my lifeline,” said Mortenson, 17, a senior at High School for the Arts. “I feel like I’ve come on to an artistic being I never knew was there and I am anxious to show my new awareness of being an artist.”

Her long-term goals are to perform in musical theater, join an opera company while in her late-20s and become an acclaimed diva by the time she reaches 35.

Mortenson will sing the “Black Swan” aria from Menotti’s “The Medium.” It’s a piece that Mortenson said she was not fond of in the beginning but has grown to like. It will, she hopes, demonstrate her technique, interpretation and stage presence with music she loves.

Finalist in drama Ed Staudenmayer, 17, will be acting the role of 30-year-old Dick in a scene from “The Dining Room,” by A. R. Gurney Jr., a contemporary saga spanning several years in an East Coast WASP family’s dining room. He and Matt Kaminsky, 17, who will be playing Harvey, Dick’s father, will be performing together, although they will also be competing.

“We’ve worked together on this before in a student production,” said Staudenmayer, who says he and Kaminsky, both seniors from Palm Springs High School, will split any prize money.

Staudenmayer said he plans to pursue an acting career after high school and is especially interested in character roles.

“I try to figure out what that person is like and then take points from something that happened in my own life and put it back into the character,” he said. “There’s always a part of yourself you can put into that character.”

Staudenmayer said the hardest part for him acting this role in the competition will be reaching the judges and the audience through his reactions to Kaminsky, since Kaminsky will speak most of the lines as the duo play a father and son discussing the father’s will.

“I have to listen mostly since I don’t have many lines, but I’ll be thinking of my own father and how I’d react to him. I really have to be into it for it to be real for me,” he said. And he summed up the attitude of several of the participants in the Winterfest competition. “It’s a nice feeling when you’ve moved somebody.”

Other finalists include: Max Levinson, 16, instrumental, a senior at Crossroads; Yohanna Ragins, 17, dance, who attends the Westside School of Ballet; Janice Patrion Hudson, 17, vocal, a senior at High School for the Arts; and Douglas Robbins Addison, 17, and Russell E. Bell, 17, both drama finalists from San Pedro High School.