Coming out of our 75th-anniversary celebrations and moving into the next phase with Nicola Benedetti as our director, we are focused on the future of our Festival city. If we’re still to be here in 75 years’ time, we need to invest in our young people now. We may be international, but we are also part of Edinburgh and we have a responsibility to the community.

Last year, our learning and engagement team finished a major four-year residency at Leith Academy, a project for creating cultural opportunities within the school and equipping the students with personal, social and vocational skills. We learned so much from them that we're going to embed into everything we do going forward. We are making a commitment to the young people of our city; we want to ensure that they can connect with the Festival, both now and for years into the future.

Leith Academy showed us that success isn’t just in the big moments – the opening nights or the awards. I see success in the one-to-one interactions we have with students where they reflect on the impact that the residency has had on their lives.

It's about the unseen moments – it’s about creating a ripple effect from the Festival that can be felt across the whole city. The finale of the Leith Academy residency was Muster Station: Leith by Grid Iron theatre company, an immersive theatre piece staged within the school.

A few months prior, our development team worked with a group of S3 business studies students to teach them about fundraising. Using the skills they had developed from these sessions, the pupils wrote to businesses to apply for funding for their new music tech equipment. For its opening event, we invited lots of guests, including donors who contributed to this project. I got to introduce a business studies student to some of the people they had written to including staff from Baillie Gifford, our learning and engagement partners. Seeing them meet in real life and how much it meant to both of them was just incredible.

What I want to take forward from Leith Academy is a way to create pathways into the arts, both on and off stage, for young people across Edinburgh. I want to create spaces that weren’t available for me at that age.

This year, we’re taking everything we’ve learned and putting it into our project with the United States’ most popular dance company, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. We are creating an opportunity for 22 young dancers that have a connection with Scotland – whether they live here, studied here or are from here – to dance on stage with the company in an International Festival performance.

Young dancers with a connection to Scotland will have a chance to perform with the United States' most popular dance company, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, in an Edinburgh International Festival performance (Picture: Timothy A Clary/AFP via Getty Images)

The dancers will join the company for Memoria, a piece choreographed by Alvin Ailey himself as a tribute to his friend who passed away. It starts with a beautiful duet but ends with a joyful celebration of life as a chorus of young people dances on stage. When we found out it was going to be a part of this year’s Festival, we knew we wanted to create a specially formed company of young dancers to be part of it.

It’s been performed in the past with the students from the Ailey School and dancers from Ailey II, a second company for young professionals, but we wanted to put the call out to as many people in Scotland as possible, to open up the opportunity and find the best talent that’s out there.

We are inviting applications from emerging dancers aged 18 to 25 who are at the start of their careers, with no more than three professional credits. It’s a paid opportunity – the dancers will get a daily fee, support with travel costs, accommodation and a proper rehearsal period to learn the piece. They’ll work with the company’s rehearsal director, Ronni Favors, to learn the choreography and be treated just like the professional dancers.

The auditions will take place with Ronni who is flying over from New York, but our team will also be there to support everyone coming in and out of the auditions. We want to make sure that we can create a relaxed atmosphere, give everyone time to warm up and provide a positive audition experience, especially as for some people it might be their first-ever audition.

We just want to create a really well-looked-after first job in the industry and take away as many obstacles as possible for people. We want to show dancers emerging in Scotland that there are opportunities here. We’re accepting applications now and holding auditions in June, and we really want as many people as possible to apply, people who this would be a dream for.

I want to help young people growing up in Edinburgh see that there is a career for themselves in the creative industries and within their own city. Whether that’s an apprentice studying joinery who could get work building sets or an electrician apprentice who could be running a lighting deck in ten years’ time, or whether it’s your neighbour’s little girl at the dance studio around the corner who could be taking to the Festival Theatre stage with a leading dance company.

I’ve seen young people have their minds opened to careers in the arts, but I don’t think we’ll see the real impact for maybe another ten years, when one of them is sat at a desk beside me.

Caroline Donald is the head of learning and engagement at Edinburgh International Festival. For full details of how to audition and the 2023 programme, please visit www.eif.co.uk.

Edinburgh International Festival is working to find the next generation of talented performers – Caroline Donald

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