I’ve always written here as if narrating a therapeutic cyber-diary: very honest, open and uncensored.  So today as I am feeling less than stellar, my voice will not change;  I would like to remain as exposed as always.  Read on prudently, knowing that I aim to share with you my triumphs and my struggles, just as they are, because this is one of the many lessons ballet has taught me.  No exaggerations, no sugar coating, just the truth.  

Sometimes, ballet is a very lonely thing.  Of course, there are times when you’re dancing in a corps full of your best friends, or when you’re paired with a strong partner, with whom you enjoy both pirouetting and partying with.  But there are also times when you feel so alone that it seems ballet is your only companion, and even it is eating you up from the inside, like a parasitic intruder you just can’t seem to exterminate.

Right now feels like that.

You see, ballet never stops pushing you.  Just when you finish off a weekend of painfully intimidating performances for which you’ve had less than adequate time to rehearse, someone falls ill and you’re hoisted into a difficult 10 minute contemporary pas de deux with uncountable music and 2 days to learn and prepare it.  And this is how ballet is.  Or as they say, “this is how it goes”.  Behind a world of supposed beauty and elegance lives a warhorse, whose tired feet are being beaten deeper and deeper into the mud by an invisible force pushing downward while they try with all their might to climb just an inch uphill.

So we deal with it.  We grit our teeth, lift our chins, and dance not only because that is what we are trained to do, but because ballet demands it.  Emergencies, accidents…life happens.  As professionals, it is our job to make sure the audience remains unaware of our internal battles and completely captivated by the magical web we weave, no matter how thin it may feel to the hands (feet) weaving it.

I’ll leave you with a clip of a Viktor Plotnikov piece I danced at the Youth America Grand Prix competition when I was sixteen.  It is called “Alone”.  Enjoy.