1st Ballet Exam = failed

I feel awful.

I feel bad. I feel sad.

I feel a deep anguish in my heart.

That’s how I feel right now, after my ballet exam, and it’s not even the last. I’ll be participating of the adult exam too this evening. I can imagine how disappointed both of my teacher are, probably not as much as I am.

We had a normal class, with barre, center, petit and grand allegros, révérence, etc. With some exercises we don’t usually train in class. We never finish with a révérence. We don’t have as much petit or grand allegros as we should. Anyway, it really doesn’t matter in the end.

But the main point is that I have no talent at all. Probably not all training in the world would make me a Prima or a Soloist, I could never be part of the Corps of a Company, big or small. Every single step I could make until now it’s because I trained for hours, days, repetead, tried again. I’m not a natural nor a talent who need to be polished. I’m just really dedicated. Which now I know was also a useless chracteristic.

I was calm when I arrived there. I was nervous in the class. The evaluation teeachers were my teacher (the school founder) and a guest teacher. It was just me and my two friends. I was number 1 again. We were messing up a lot of barre exercises, some less, some others more. Center was awful as well.

In the end, the guest teacher made some questions and said some words. “How many times you do classes per week?” “-Three – my friend said”, “Do you usually try to go beyond or do you stay in the sameness?”. I didn’t answer that, I knew how much effort I had put in all my ballet life, specially this year. “-[apparently] I think we stay in the sameness – my friend said”, “Do you really want to be approved? To pass to the next level? To keep going on ballet?” “-Yes. – we all said “Are you really trying? Because I see no effort at all in you”. That hit me in my heart. I wanted to cry when I left the room, but I didn’t, because there were two other little girls waiting to do their exam.

Well, I had to go get my UN model certificate, the actual good part of my afternoon, and buy some Oreos for my mom’s atelier. I’ll have one more test in the evening. Let’s see how it goes.

Sorry for all these complaining,

Love,

Arissa Ayumi