We've been fairly obsessed with ballet for the last few months. It all began when I took a photo of Arie playing around in the kitchen pretending to be a ballerina and it looked so effortless for her, she floats in the air as if she really is weightless. Then I saw a documentary about Misty Copeland and really fell in love with the possibilities, and also after Arie was a swan for Halloween and her Kindergaten teacher commented on how she fit that costume so well and how she would imagine her taking ballet because she felt she looked like a ballerina with her long neck!..I realized that we had been so overwhelmed with her starting Kindergarten that we had forgotten to continue to engage her in some extra curricular activity. I looked into the local dance school here and although the courses had been in progress for a few weeks, they took her in and even got her a costume for the recital. She joined a pre-ballet class because she joined late so the other children in the class are 6 months to a year younger than she is but it was fine because our neighbor (one of her playmates) was also in that class. The class was already practicing for the end of year show when she joined but I figured that if she were a natural, it would...you know...come natural so to speak. Well I was wrong!
With no one watching, she's a confident performer but as soon as there is structure (which there was..in form of a one and a half minute routine) and an audience, she freezes. She is just really shy to the discontent of some people, I guess because it seems like she is being unfriendly but she's not. She's always been that way, she is still reluctant to give a hug when she sees my mom, she barely will talk on the phone to her cousin and best friend (my niece) and is even reserved when they first get together even though they see each other every weekend.
She wasn't really able to keep up with routine at first even with the young teacher leading them but then at her last class before the big show, her daddy sat and captured video of the whole routine...one week to the performance. We basically, loaded it up on the Apple TV and made her practice the routine in our living room every night until the final performance. She did improve greatly by the final performance.
She was even teaching her little sis the five positions of ballet. Anyway, the performance was really nice, they did a routine to the "flight of the bumblebees" and I was impressed and very proud of her. What was also nice was to see the older more advanced classes perform which reinforced my confidence in this schools staffs ability to get her properly trained and proficient in the art of ballet. I had already begun looking at enrolling her in the Gelsey Kirkland program for classical ballet.
