Foothills talent continues to impress tourists from around the globe each summer at the “Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth.”
More than half a dozen singers and dancers from the Okotoks area are among the local, national and international talent selected to entertain crowds at the Calgary Stampede July 7 to 16.
Eight young Okotoks singers and dancers will be a part of the nightly TransAlta Grandstand Show, Nashville North regular Tanya Ryan will entertain during the Stampede’s final days and Okotoks’ singer/songwriter Michela Sheedy hits the Coca-Cola stage July 16.
“I’m looking forward to putting on one of the best shows of my life,” said Sheedy, a previous finalist of the Stampede’s Nashville North Rising Star Competition. “I am over the moon that I’ve been given this opportunity.”
Sheedy’s half-hour show on July 16 at 12:30 p.m. will showcase a mixture of country and classic rock songs, as well as some originals.
“I feel like every year I’m taking baby steps in terms of progressing in my career,” she said. “This is more of a leap. I’m very excited to see what comes next.”
The Stampede has been a big part of Sheedy’s life from watching the parade at age five to competing in the Stampede Talent Search in her teens and later the Nashville North Star competition.
“It provides a platform for young emerging artists to really get out there and show an insanely large amount of people their talent and make a lot of connections,” she said. “It’s helped me build my fan base, develop my performance skills and made me an adaptable performer.”
Tanya Ryan’s music career has catapulted since winning the 2012 Nashville North Star competition. This summer marks her fifth year on the stage.
“It’s one of my favourite shows to play,” she said. “It’s flattering to be invited back every year. It reinforces that I’m doing a good job.”
The Millarville singer/songwriter was invited back as a special guest this year where she will perform some covers and originals July 12, 14, 15 and 16 at midnight and 1 a.m. and July 13 at midnight.
“It will be a pretty energetic show,” she said. “I will play quite a bit of country music but I’m bringing some different flavours to the show this year, too, like some funk-based stuff. I did a little bit of it last year and it went over really well.”
The TransAlta Grandstand Show will be abuzz with activity with theatrical special effects, music, dance and acrobatics hosted by recording artist Jann Arden. This year’s theme is Together.
The Young Canadians of the Calgary Stampede will perform on stage every night at around 10 p.m. All but two of the Okotoks performers are members of the Young Canadians School of Performing Arts, a youth program that runs from September to April.
This is 14-year-old senior dancer Sydney LeMaistre’s second grandstand show.
“The first night last year I was in shock because there were so many people in the audience,” she said. “It’s almost 20,000 people. There is nothing like it. It’s crazy.”
LeMaistre will perform five dances, including tap and jazz, with 80 to 150 dancers and will join the other Young Canadians in singing O Canada.
“I love the fact that I get to do both singing and dancing,” she said. “I used to be in competitive dancing but I also really loved to sing.”
Seventeen-year-old Brooke Ashbaugh has a unique role. She is one of 12 dancers selected to be an aerialist.
“I’m one of the lucky dancers who gets to go up in the air,” she said. “We go up in the air about 60 feet and do a whole aerial combination in a 360 harness while Jann Aden is singing on the stage.”
Having performed with the Young Canadians for three years Ashbaugh still gets a little nervous on the first night, but it quickly goes away.
“The lights are kind of blinding you,” she said. “You can see the audience but all you see on people’s faces is smiles. That just makes me happy as a dancer looking down at the audience and seeing that they’re smiling.
Junior singer Jack Leathwaite, 10, will step on the grandstand stage for the first time this week, joining more than 40 youth in singing songs like O Canada and Snowbird.
“I’m very nervous,” he said. “We’ve seen the stage and I didn’t know there is that many seats. There is a lot more than I expected.”
With experience in singing and dancing since the age of three, and rigorous training the past two months, Leathwaite is show ready.
“It’s a lot of hard work but it’s worth it because it’s really fun,” he said. “It’s been a good experience.”
The Okotoks area’s other Young Canadians are senior singer Chloe Lofvendahl, intermediate dancers Shelly Murray and Isis MacDonald, intermediate singer Georgia Pugh and junior singer Hailey Murray.
To purchase tickets to the TransAlta Grandstand Show go to calgarystampede.com
