54th Positano Premia la Danza Léonide Massine
Saturday, September 5, 2026, 8:30 PM • Positano Spiaggia Grande
AWARD-WINNING ARTISTS GALA
Saturday, September 5, 8:30 p.m., Spiaggia Grande in Positano
Artistic Director LAURA VALENTE
Presented by Journalist MARIA CAVA
Artistic Coordinator since 2023
ALESSIO CARBONE
AWARD WINNERS:
SYLVIE GUILLEM Francia
Lifetime Achievement Award and Absolute Dancer
VIRGINIA ATTANASIO Italia
“Luca Vespoli” Award for the Promotion and Support of Dance
ANDREA VILIANI Italia
Special Award for Research and the Integration of the Arts and Digital Innovation
DANCERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD:
Japan, England, Korea, Denmark, Sweden, France, the United States, Germany, Austria, Italy, Australia, and the Principality of Monaco
Staatsballet Berlin
HARUKA SASSA Japan – Germany
KALLE WIGLE Sweden – Germany
Teatro alla Scala di Milano
ANTONELLA ALBANO Italy
ALICE MARIANI Italia
GIOACCHINO STARACE Italy
NAVRIN TURNBULL Australia – Italy
Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris
HOHYUN KANG South Korea – France
LORENZO LELLI Italy – France
Ballet de Monte-Carlo e Royal Danish Ballet
DILLON BRIZIC United States – Principality of Monaco
TOBIAS JØRGENSEN Denmark
The Royal Ballet
ANNA ROSE O’SULLIVAN England
ANTONELLA ALBANO Italy
Wiener Staatsballett
MADISON YOUNG Usa – Austria
ALESSANDRO FROLA Italy – Austria
BOARD
JOSÉ CARLOS MARTÍNEZ GARCIA
Directeur de la Danse de l’Opéra National de Paris Francia/Spagna
SUSANNE JAFFE
Artistic Director of the American Ballet Theatre – USA
KEVIN O’HARE
Director of The Royal Ballet London
Frédéric Olivieri
Director of the Ballet Company at La Scala – Italy/France
LAURA VALENTE
Artistic Director of the Massine Prize since 2016 – Italy
Honorary Presidents of the Léonide Massine Award
ALBERTO TESTA e ALFIO AGOSTINI
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
SYLVIE GUILLEM
Discovered by Rudolf Nureyev, Sylvie Guillem was appointed an étoile of the Paris Opera at just 19 years of age. She spent twenty years with the Royal Ballet in London, becoming one of the defining interpreters of such giants as Maurice Béjart, William Forsythe, Mats Ek and Akram Khan. Awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, her artistic life has embraced both the classical and contemporary repertoire with equal authority, establishing her as one of the most influential dancers of her generation.
“Sylvie Guillem was never an étoile like the others, and perhaps that is precisely why, at the age of nineteen, Rudolf Nureyev decided to appoint her as such, breaking with the long-standing conventions of the Paris Opera. From that moment on, her body — capable of an extension that seemed to defy the laws of anatomy — became the instrument through which contemporary dance learned to express new ideas.
At the Royal Ballet in London, over the course of twenty years, she danced the works of Béjart and Forsythe, Mats Ek and Akram Khan, bringing everywhere the same uncompromising technical precision and the same curiosity towards the language of her own time, while never ceasing to be, first and foremost, a ‘classical’ dancer.
The Lifetime Achievement Award and Ballerina Assoluta is bestowed upon an artist who has taught generations that technique, when it is genuine, is never an end in itself, but a means to freedom: it is not the absence of rules, but the intensity with which one inhabits a gesture, the personal signature that no school can teach, the courage to venture beyond what has already been written.
Then, as now.”
THE STORY OF AN AWARD THAT HAS CONTINUED TO EVOLVE
The pearl of the Amalfi Coast has attracted some of the greatest artists in the world since the 1920s, when one of Diaghilev’s collaborators settled here, soon followed by artists such as Lifar, Bakst, Nijinsky and Stravinsky, as well as iconic figures including Picasso and Cocteau.
Léonide Massine, the celebrated dancer and choreographer of the Ballets Russes, fell in love with Positano, and the powerful impresario Sergei Diaghilev gifted him the nearby islands known as Li Galli.
Among the many distinguished figures who have walked its streets were Vaslav Nijinsky and Rudolf Nureyev, who in turn made Li Galli one of his beloved retreats.
On 2 August 1969, the Positano Award was born. Ten years after its first edition, following the death of Léonide Massine, the award was renamed in his honour.
Over the years, the event has celebrated — impossible to name them all — some of the most renowned artists in the history of dance: from Margot Fonteyn to Rudolf Nureyev, from Maurice Béjart to Ekaterina Maximova, Carla Fracci and Luciana Savignano, Elisabetta Terabust and Roberto Bolle, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Alicia Alonso, Mats Ek, Jiří Kylián, Wayne McGregor, Marie Chouinard, Lutz Förster, Vladimir Vassiliev, Nacho Duato, Svetlana Zakharova, Viengsay Valdés and Anthony Dowell, among the many extraordinary artists honoured throughout the numerous editions of the Award.
The Positano Award never stopped, not even during the pandemic, when a special edition dedicated to Carla Fracci was held in 2021.
The Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Alessandra Ferri in 2022; to Luciana Savignano, together with Benjamin Millepied, in 2023; to Dada Masilo, alongside Dancer of the Year Lucía Lacarra, in 2024; and to Angelin Preljocaj in 2025.