Next week will see the great and the good of the ballet world descend on Nagoya for the Fourth Japan International Ballet and Modern Dance Competition. This triennial event, inaugurated in 1993, is unusual among leading international dance competitions in featuring simultaneous classical and modern dance contests. Judges include such luminaries as Michael Denard (formerly etoile, or star dancer with the Paris Opera Ballet and Director of the Berlin Staatsopera), Frank Andersen (Artistic Director of the Royal Danish Ballet), and the legendary Maya Plisetskaya, who danced with the Bolshoi for almost 50 years.

The fierce selection process begins well before the competition does. Of 306 applicants from 40 countries, video screening whittled down the number of performing competitors in the classical category to 101 dancers (performing solo or in pairs) from 20 countries; in the modern category, to 35 dancers from 16 countries. It's perhaps surprising, then, that five places in the classical competition went to dancers from the Northern Plains Ballet, a little-known semi-professional company from Bismarck, North Dakota, in the heart of American prairieland.

So what is going on in this rural area, usually associated more with duck-shooting than with ballet dancing? How did Anthony Noa, a former dancer at the Deutsche Opera, Berlin, who performed the title role in Don Quixote at the Serbian National Theater and who has also taught at well-regarded ballet schools worldwide, become artistic director of a provincial company in a small town in the Midwest cattle-ranching plains?

As Noa puts his dancers through their paces to the accompaniment of a portable stereo, in a small studio near the edge of Bismarck, Becky Stockman, the company's executive director, tells the story:

"We had a small dance studio that taught typical offerings for kids. Then we lost our teacher and the owner found Anthony's resume on the Web. Anthony had approached companies in Boston and San Francisco, cities known for ballet, with his intensive, accelerated training program. They knew his choreography and wanted him, but not his program. He decided to help us finish the school year, never intending to stay. But when he came up here, he saw it as fertile soil for his project."

Noa, a tall, perfectly postured Alabaman, elaborates on the distinctive features of his program: "Normally kids train all year in class, but get very little performing. My idea is that if you train people to be principal dancers and soloists, then they need to get on stage.

"Without this experience, they're not going to get a principal contract till they're 30, when one day somebody likes them and lets them try solo. If, by 21, they could have done five years of principal parts, they not only have the resume and credentials, they have the maturity to be doing that work in a company."

Stockman recalls the initial results. "There was one accomplished dancer, and the rest were just ready to work. Anthony trained them for three months, and then put on a ten-minute Tchaikovsky piece. Every student in the school was in that piece, age five to 19, and the parents and I were shocked that he could put on something so fabulous with nothing. So I decided to try to establish something here. That was May 1998, and we put on our first major production that December."

Noa was hired on a three-year contract. At the time, Stockman was uncertain how things would work out, but clearly feels justified now that dancers Roy Gan, 27, Courtney Jones, 16, Joseph Villalobos, 23, and Laura de Guia, 19, have qualified to dance on the big stage at Nagoya. The fifth dancer was unable to make the trip.

She hopes some of them will follow in the footsteps of such previous Japan International Ballet Competition successes as Miyako Yoshida (now a principal at the Royal Ballet in London), Tan Yuan Yuan (principal at the San Francisco Ballet) and Andrei Batalov (principal at the Kirov in St. Petersburg), and so bring the Dakota company to the attention of the ballet world.

Villalobos, too, believes that Nagoya is a big step forward for the company and its dancers. "It takes us to an entire new level of professional development. But that's what we want and what we feel we're capable of. We're not looking at it like we have to win; the work is what we want. The competition is definitely one of the biggest ones."

Success at Nagoya would bring recognition and security for the company, says Stockman. "I'd like to see us financially secure, and for this community to say 'we are proud of the Northern Plains Ballet.' I'd like to be able to say that we've become a major training ground for dancers, feeding major companies."

For Noa, the Japanese competition is a momentous event, the vindication of 15 years' work developing his program.

Beyond that, though, is an even more ambitious goal. "I won't see it, because it's going to take a couple of hundred years," says Noa, "but I want see dancers able to move their limbs and bodies like violinists or pianists can their fingers."