Apogee Academy is a trailblazing set of training programs enabling gifted artists from diverse cultures to achieve their fullest potential. Working with the world’s leading specialists, Apogee Academy programs integrate the most successful multi-disciplinary artistic and educational methodologies of both East and West to create optimized environments empowering gifted artists to reach the apogee of human and artistic excellence. Apogee Academy programs welcome Apogee Awards laureates from around the world and are carefully coordinated with Apogee Artists events. Thus Apogee Academy becomes the central, transformational component in the Foundation’s virtuous circle of excellence.
In order to enrich and expand Apogee’s historically fruitful tradition of support for the development of artistic excellence, the Foundation is preparing to create a set of permanent institutions that will enable the planet’s most gifted emerging artists to achieve their greatest potential together, and in so doing to transform the world’s awareness and experience of creative excellence.
Beginning in 1999, the Foundation began offering innovative multidisciplinary training opportunities to enable the world’s most gifted emerging artists to achieve their fullest potential on the world stage.
In 2006, Apogee began consolidating these methodologies into its trademark Fusion Program: a trailblazing project designed to enable world class performing artists from both Eastern and Western cultures and training backgrounds to expand their artistic awareness and expressive skills through and beyond each others’ traditional modes of thought and performance, and thereby to empower them to achieve new forms and levels of human potential on the world stage.
In implementing its Fusion Program, Apogee unifies world best practices from both Eastern and Western, artistic and scientific sources in all relevant fields that can enable performing artists to attain and to exceed existing world best standards. In integrating these components and bringing them to bear at critical points in performing artists’ careers, the Fusion Program achieves results greater than can be produced by any sum of its parts.
The Artistic Development division of Apogee’s Fusion Programs builds on Apogee’s long history of collaboration with leading dance, drama and music training institutions to provide the Foundation’s beneficiaries with access to the fullest and most integrated possible spectrum of educational and experiential methodologies.
Apogee administers the Peak Performance division of its Fusion Programs in collaboration with global networks of leaders in the medical, therapeutic and other professional communities to provide its beneficiaries with the fullest possible complement of technologies empowering them to flourish both as artists and as human beings.
Apogee’s Synergy Programs offer gifted artists from different cultural backgrounds the opportunity to transform their diversity into mutual, collaborative empowerment in the sharing of their artistry and humanity with one other and with the world.
Synergy is defined as the interaction of different elements that results in a combined effect greater than the sum of the parts.
Apogee was originally formed as an East-West, post-Cold War collaboration to achieve new forms of understanding and achievement between political systems that lead to economic and military conflict. New intercultural programs to which the Foundation has rededicated itself in achieving such progress include interfaith contexts that have likewise resulted in conflicts despite profoundly shared cultural roots and spiritual vision.
These programs make evident to the world the unique and valuable gifts with which each cultural tradition is endowed, and the tremendous creative powers that can be generated and released into the world by bringing these powerful forces into positive synergy.
To insure that the world’s most gifted emerging artists are able to fulfill their potential on the world stage, the Foundation acquires and maintains on a ongoing, as needed basis an inventory of high quality musical instruments as well as a wardrobe of costumes and props suitable for various forms of performing arts, and provides these on loan to its beneficiaries who can most benefit from their use for the periods needed.
When the selected beneficiary’s need for the instrument has passed, or when the beneficiary ceases to be a beneficiary of the Foundation, the recipient has the option of acquiring the instrument or of returning it to the Foundation so that it can subsequently be provided on the same basis to another beneficiary who can further benefit from its use.
These items typically cost thousands of dollars to obtain, which is well beyond the means of most young emerging artists, and particularly those who are from the second and third worlds where Apogee is in many cases their only source of significant support.