Arts & Entertainment Editor Denton Record Chronicle 

Becky Acton hardly misses a beat.

“Holding back is a dancer’s biggest enemy,” she said, gathering with her peers in Denton City Contemporary Ballet.

Acton’s T-shirt is wet. Long strands of hair cling to her neck, and the dancer seems to swing her legs in a wide split unconsciously as the company members sit on the floor of the biggest studio at Denton Dance Conservatory. The young women have been rehearsing for more than five hours, getting ready for a festival in Austria that returning dancers say changed their lives.

“You can’t hold back the emotions,” Acton said, her peers nodding. “It doesn’t make sense, and if you do that, you aren’t really dancing at all.”

The ballet company will board a flight on June 23. The group is headed to Austria — and its second appearance at the Young! Tanzsommer dance festival. The festival hustles 10 young dance companies from all over the world to venues, some indoors and some outside, throughout the city of Innsbruck. Young! Tanzsommer is an auxiliary to the larger Austrian arts festival, Tanzsommer.

For Lisa Racina-Torre, the artistic director of the company, the trip is another milestone.

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