🇺🇸 William Gyves

William Gyves — the surname is pronounced 'jives' — grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, a mid-sized Southern city with an unusual asset: the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, one of America's most serious conservatory campuses. In 2016, aged nine, he entered UNCSA's Preparatory Dance Program under Matthew Donnell, the community division where local children take their first classes. There was no famous ballet family behind him and no overseas academy; his path started in a hometown studio program that happened to feed one of the strongest training pipelines in the country.

He was competing professionally from the age of ten, and the results accumulated quickly: first place at the IDANCE International Ballet Competition, first place at the Grand Jeté International Dance Awards, best solo and best group at the International Online Ballet Competition, and repeated finalist and semi-finalist placements at the Youth America Grand Prix. In 2020 he appeared at the Bolshoi Ballet Academy Gala in Moscow. In 2021 he was accepted into UNCSA's School of Dance Ballet Program, the high-school conservatory track, where he was mentored by professor of ballet Mikhail 'Misha' Tchoupakov.

His first trip to the Prix de Lausanne came in 2023, representing UNCSA with Tchoupakov as his coach. He reached the Finals and won a scholarship to the Zurich Dance Academy in Switzerland — a result most young dancers would frame as the achievement of a lifetime. Gyves treated it as a staging post. He finished his UNCSA high school diploma in 2025, moved his training to Zurich, and returned to Lausanne in 2026 wearing the Swiss academy's colors, now coached by Akos Sebestyen.

The 2026 Prix de Lausanne was the payoff. Dancing as candidate 424, Gyves presented a classical variation and a contemporary solo across the selection rounds and the Finals at the Beaulieu Theatre. Of the 14 prizes distributed, he took the biggest one: First Prize, carrying a dance scholarship from the Fondation Caris, the Swiss charitable foundation that supports emerging artists. Because he competed for a Swiss school, he also collected the Best Swiss Candidate Award from the Fondation Jacqueline de Cerenville — a double haul at the world's most prestigious competition for dancers aged 15 to 18.

The people who trained him were explicit about what the win represented. 'William is a very hard-working, intelligent dancer who deserves this win. He strategically and consistently improves his process, continuing to grow as a performer,' said Tchoupakov, who traveled to Switzerland to watch his former student. UNCSA dance dean Endalyn T. Outlaw called his story 'one of perseverance and triumph — of pursuing his passion from an early age and growing into the versatile, dynamic dancer he is today.'

Critics at the Finals noticed the same duality his teachers describe. His classical variation was praised for clean, unforced lines; his contemporary solo for an interiority unusual in a teenager — Tchoupakov singled out 'the highest level of technique and artistic maturity, especially in his contemporary dance performance.' At the Prix, where jurors are hiring directors as much as judges, that combination is precisely what wins: not tricks, but evidence that a dancer will keep growing inside a company.

The Prix de Lausanne's practical prize is the choice it hands its winners: each laureate selects a partner school or company from the competition's network. Gyves chose the Royal Ballet in London — the company directed by the very juror who chaired the panel that crowned him. For an American teenager from North Carolina, joining the institution of Fonteyn and Nureyev is a statement of intent about the kind of career he expects to have.

His win also carries local history. UNCSA has sent a stream of students to Lausanne over the past decade — six competitors between 2015 and 2022 alone — and its alumni include Gillian Murphy, who won the Prix 'Espoir' in 1995 before her celebrated American Ballet Theatre career, and the late Edward Stierle, who in 1985 became only the second American to win the competition's gold medal. Gyves now extends that lineage, and surpasses it.

There is also a broader story in the timing. Created in 1973, the Prix exists to discover talent before the professional world does, and its 2026 edition crowned an American in the same season that the Youth America Grand Prix's top prize went to a Korean training in London — evidence that elite ballet training has become fully globalized, with dancers crossing continents in their mid-teens to find the right coach. Gyves did exactly that, trading North Carolina for Zurich at 17. The bet paid off completely: a boy who started in a Saturday preparatory class in Winston-Salem stood on the Beaulieu stage, nine years later, as the best young male dancer in the world.