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Stela Viorica is a former principal dancer with National Ballet of Romania. She is a graduate of the
National Academy of Ballet in Bucharest and has had the privilege to be privately coached by Maestro Umrihin, a teacher from the Vagonova Institute. During her career as a professional dancer, Ms. Viorica toured
extensively with the National Ballet of Romania throughout Europe, and has been featured in various principal roles in both classical and contemporary ballets such as Giselle, Romeo and Juliet, Copelia, La fille mal
garde, and Swan Lake among many others.
After traveling extensively throughout Europe, Ms. Viorica relocated to California in 1985 where she is
now an American citizen. She began to extend her work into choreography, staging, teaching and coaching. As Stella Dance Company's residential Choreographer since 1990, Ms. Viorica has created seven
full-length productions such as Alice and Wonderland, Mary Poppins, A Christmas Carol, Open Audition, as well as numerous other works, including Black and White in 1994 to celebrate the opening of Hoag Hospital's Cancer
Research Center. She received the special award-Outstanding Choreographer – at the prestigious Grand Prix Ballet Competition in 2000 in Long Beach and at the Festival of Dance in Laguna Beach in 2003.
Acknowledging the importance of developing the next generation of artists and their audience, she has presented free educational arts outreach performances to thousands of children in Orange County since 1990. In
addition, Ms. Viorica has twice been a guest speaker for the Orange County Performing Arts Center Dance Alliance.
Ms. Viorica believes that art nourishes the soul. Her work is about emotional renewal.
She challenges audiences to react, reminding them often with gentle irony to value life's gifts as well as foibles. Being able to choreograph in diverse styles from pure classical to modern allows her to appeal to
a wide range of tastes. She has no interest in creating endless repetitions of the same themes or musical genres. Her catholic music tastes include Classical, East Indian, Japanese, Romanian, Irish, New Age,
Traditional, Iranian and Turkish music.
Ms. Viorica strives to offer students the highest quality of dance instruction. Under her guidance her students have gone on to be awarded scholarships at world
renowned training programs such as the National Ballet of Canada, the Boston Ballet, the Joffrey Ballet, Houston Ballet, the Kirov Ballet School in Washington D.C., the San Francisco Ballet, Pacific North West Ballet,
among others and have competed in Varna, Bulgaria.
Her goal is to promote, preserve and de-mystify the art of dancing in the community, to provide a training ground for aspiring professional dancers, and to be a
resource for education and entertainment in Orange County. |
