Gracelyn Weber isn’t a typical teenager.
When she’s not working through her high school classes online, she’s dancing.
And dancing, and dancing.
Weber, a Savannah resident and a sophomore studying academics through iUniversity Preparatory School, was recently named one of the members of the 12th Texas Young Masters class.
The distinction comes with $10,000 in grants for the young dancer. The program is administered by the state-funded Texas Cultural Trust through the Texas Commission on the Arts and other agencies. The trust raises public awareness of the arts in education as well as private funds to support them.
Weber said she remembers the call that she was among the 15 Texas students selected for the program.
“I was in my room by myself, and Matrex [Kilgore, a co-director of the Young Masters program] called me. He said, ‘Hey is your mom with you?’” Weber recalled.
She added her mother, Megan, to the call. Megan Weber was traveling that day, weeks after they’d submitted a video of Gracelyn Weber’s dance to the program.
“What did he say? Oh, yeah, he said, ‘I’m happy to congratulate you on being one of the class of 2024 Texas Young Masters,’ and I was super excited.”
Weber said the program director chatted with her about her solo work in her video and complimented her skills.
“You don’t always hear a lot of personal validation whenever you’re in the dance world,” Weber said.
Weber is one of four children — an older sister who was in the 2022 Young Masters program as a dancer, and twin brothers. Weber is a Kansas native who relocated to Texas when her older sister and one of her brothers showed promise in dance.
Weber studies dance with a focus on ballet and contemporary in the Dallas Conservatory, which has studios in Frisco and Dallas. She’s also a member of Regeneration Contemporary, a North Texas company that brings the best of emerging contemporary dancers from across the Dallas-Fort Worth Area into a single company directed by Dallas dancer, choreographer and costume designer Brian Stevens.
Weber has already added some impressive credits to her young resume: She was named among the New York City Dance Alliance’s top 12 outstanding teen dancers last year, an honor that capped off a rigorous, eight-day audition process. She danced the roles of the Snow Queen and the Chinese lead in Dallas Conservatory’s Nutcracker. She recently placed third in the New York City Dance Alliance competition and in the top 12 at Youth America Grand Prix.
To say dance is her life is an understatement.
“It does depend on what’s going on competition-wise,” Weber said. “But I would say I have 30 hours a week, 30 to 35, depending on rehearsal time. So quite a bit. And during the summer, it varies a little bit as well, depending on what intensives I’m doing.”
Intensives are summer courses that put dancers in the studio all day to develop both technique and artistry. Her weeks include classes in ballet, jazz, hip-hop and contemporary, and classes where she’s the teacher and working with younger dancers. She also studies acrobatics, voice and acting.
She’s leading the TDC Frisco Campus Acting Company’s tech team and is co-directing and choreographing the upcoming show, The Little Mermaid.
On top of dance and school, she studies piano. “It’s what I do to relax,” she said. She also loves to sew and is considering starting her own dancewear company in the future.
She considers ballet her foundation.
“I study so much ballet because that’s kind of the thing that’s going to help me,” she said. “It’s like the building blocks to help me advance in other styles, too, because it has all the technique that you have to know. So even though I don’t necessarily want to be a ballerina — it’s definitely not my favorite style — but it’s helping me grow my technique.”
Professionally, Weber said she hopes to dance on Broadway. Her dream job? To dance on tour with Taylor Swift.
“Oh my gosh, I would love to perform with her,” Weber said.
Broadway and Swift would make good use of her favorite dance form: contemporary dance.
Weber will use her two $5,000 grant awards to pay for summer studies, she said.
Megan Weber said she’s watched her daughter develop character along with her dance skills.
“She’s got that resilience that you need to follow the path Gracelyn’s going on,” Megan Weber said. “She’s going to hear a lot of ‘no’s.’ They have to be able to understand that that ‘no’ doesn’t mean you’re terrible. It’s just it’s not the right fit and be able to move on from there and not take it personally. And she has the nature to do that, you know?”
Weber said she doesn’t tire of dance after all the hours, all the sweat and the occasional injury, like the broken foot that sidelined her from a recent Nutcracker season.
“I can live all these different lives when I’m dancing,” she said. “You imagine all these different stories. It just feels really good to do. Like, I show up to dance, and I could be in a super bad mood. But then I start dancing and I almost forget about everything, and I’m focused because even though I’m working super hard, that’s kind of something that’s been drilled into me, and I naturally do that so I can just enjoy what I’m doing.”