It’s hard to imagine that Palisadian Jeri Gaile has been director of the Music Center’s Spotlight Awards, an annual competition for high school students in the performing and visual arts, for 10 years. She’s as infectiously enthusiastic as a newcomer, even though she’s spent the last several months organizing and attending hundreds of auditions for musicians, dancers and singers from San Diego to Santa Barbara. She tells the auditioning teens, ‘You need to squeeze the juice out of the events that happen in your life, see what you can learn from every single moment.’ Next week, Gaile and her team will announce two grand-prize finalists in each performing arts category’classical and jazz instrumentalists, classical and non-classical vocalists, ballet and non-classical dancers’who will compete in a live performance at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on April 30. Each winner will receive a $5,000 scholarship; runners-up, a $4,000 scholarship. But the teens, and all their competitors, will have already won a lot more. Students at all levels of talent are encouraged to participate in the free program and everyone who applies in the performing arts categories (about 1,200 teens this year) gets a live audition. Judges offer each one a detailed written critique that highlights strengths and offers constructive criticism. ‘The thrust of the program is education first, competition second,’ Gaile says. So Spotlight prepares the teens, both artistically and emotionally, for the auditions. ‘I love to say we’re somewhere between dancing for grandma and auditioning for Juilliard.’ Even very talented kids with lots of training may be nervous. ‘We want these children to have their self-esteem and self-worth before they walk into an audition room, while they’re auditioning and, most importantly, when they walk out of an audition,’ Gaile says. ‘I want them to spend as much time thinking about those things [they do well] as they do about the things that don’t go well.’ Gaile is particularly well qualified to understand the psyche of these talented youngsters. She was a ballet dancer for most of her life. When she suffered a bad knee injury at 18, she began performing other, less stressful forms of dance and ultimately transitioned into acting (including a three-year role as Rose McKay on the primetime soap opera ‘Dallas’). When she was ready for her ‘next act,’ she knew she wanted to work with kids. ‘I realized that the performing arts are about mentorship.’ She took on some dance-related projects for the Music Center and then ‘this job opened up and it was kind of like a gift from the universe,’ Gaile says. ‘It was sort of tailor-made for me.’ After the auditions, judges choose 15 semi-finalists in each category who get to take master classes with professionals from organizations like the Los Angeles Philharmonic, USC’s Thornton School of Music and the New York City Ballet. Spotlight alumni are in major arts organizations across the country. ‘Our kids are dancing with American Ballet Theatre, singing with the Metropolitan Opera and playing with the New York Philharmonic, they’re concertizing all over the world, and we have tons of kids who are on Broadway,’ Gaile says. Perhaps the alum with the highest household name recognition is ‘American Idol’ runner-up Adam Lambert. Closer to home, Palisadian Philip Golub, a jazz instrumentalist from Crossroads School, was a 2008 finalist in the program. Some of the young composer’s work will be premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic this April. Adam Goldman, a jazz bassist who lives in Pacific Palisades and is a junior at the Colburn School, was selected as one of 15 semifinalists in his category this year. But Gaile is convinced that even high schoolers who don’t pursue careers in the arts benefit from the experience. ‘Competition is a natural part of life’college, conservatories, professional life’you are going to have to learn how to audition.’ The energetic director has her own plans for the future. She hopes one day to have enough funding to add a theater category to the awards, start a summer program for kids who don’t have access to private teachers and reach out to children in underserved communities.
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