Ballet Exam

Exactly a week ago, we had our classical ballet exam. As anticipated, it was long and exhausting, but I am happy with how it went. Each ballet exam is supposed to be one hour and ten minutes long, from start to finish, including all of the time spent resting between combinations. In that time, the class must do exercises at the barre and in the center, jumps, and (for the classes of girls) pointe. To allow ourselves the time to do as many combinations as possible, and to keep the attention of the members of the judging panel (who assign grades for each of the Russian students and must sit through two of these exams consecutively, since each level almost always has two 'parallel' classes and these parallel classes do their exams on the same day), resting time between the combinations is minimized as much as possible. Despite this, and despite the fact that we had only seven people dancing in the exam, I think that we went a bit over our time limit. Needless to say, by the end of the exam, all seven of us were pretty exhausted.

It was a good sort of exhausted, though, as I think that every single one of us with pleased with how things had gone. To make everything even better, our teacher, Liudmila Kovaleva, was happy with it, too.

Here we are after the exam. I'm sitting on the floor (on the right) with Mao (Japan); standing behind us are, from left to right, Virginia (Brazil), Nika (Russia), Liudmila Kovaleva (our much-adored ballet teacher), Nastia (Russia), Guzal (Kazakhstan), and Albina (Kyrgyzstan). (Even though Guzal and Albina are not from Russia, they are in the program for Russian students, meaning that they attend all of the standard academic classes offered at the school, live in the dormitory with the Russian students, and are assigned grades by the judging panel).

After we finished, we changed out of our exam uniforms and gathered together to wait for our teacher to come tell us the grades assigned to the Russian students (by the judging panel) and to Mao, Virginia, and I (by Liudmila Kovaleva herself). After that, it was time to celebrate! We began by splitting a bar of chocolate amongst ourselves and then ended up at a frozen yogurt shop. It was absolutely excellent.

This shop also sells waffles, and, if you want, you can buy a waffle topped with frozen yogurt. They also have covered the walls and floor of the back corner with fake grass and supplied it with plenty of beanbags and pillows to create a nice place to sit if you aren't feeling like using the tables and chairs. It's a fun place.

The next morning, we got straight back to work, this time preparing for our duet exam, which will happen later this afternoon. We've had duet class five times in the past six days, and now we hopefully are ready to complete that exam as well. I'm excited for it, but also a little sad, since we won't have any more duet classes after we finish our exam, and duet is always something that I look forwards to having. I'm going to do my very best to enjoy this exam as much as I can.