Last week was very bizarre for me. It felt like about a months worth of things happened in the span of 7 days. To begin with, on Sunday I flew down to Tampa to perform in another gig organized by Daniel Ulbricht. I danced Agon and Nutcracker pas de deux. It was a rather hectic day because I had rehearsal with the company until 7 pm the night before so I couldn’t fly out until the morning of the show. I got up bright and early at 5:30 (actually it was still dark) and flew south, when we arrived we marked through our spacing and immediately got our make-up and costumes on and performed at 3 pm. I honestly don’t know how we all did it, but I guess after performing professionally one learns how to prepare for such things, even in a crunch. What made it more stressful for me was that my original partner sliced his thumb badly 2 days beforehand and was unable to partner so we had to find a replacement last minute. Considering all of the obstacles I think that it was a very nice performance and it is always fulfilling to go to smaller towns and meet the local ballet students and bring them ballets they may never see unless they travel to large cities when ballet companies happen to be performing.
I returned home after less than 24 hour in the Sunshine State in order to make it back in time for my college classes on Monday nights. When Tuesday rolled around I was exhausted considering I didn’t really have any time to rest over the weekend. I had a rather busy day ahead of me as I was called for 3 hours of rehearsal for the new Peter Martin’s ballet that will premiere at NYCB’s gala in less than a month. I was a little confused when I saw the schedule because I remembered hearing that it was his intention to create a ballet with all principal dancers, but there were 4 soloists called to this rehearsal. I figured that he had changed his mind and wanted a larger cast so had decided to expand into the lower ranks. When Peter walked into the room Tuesday afternoon the pianist immediately began playing “Happy Birthday” and all of us quickly realized it was his birthday.  He got started on our movement without any particularly special introduction or explanations. Then about half way into the rehearsal he was refining a step and  was wondering if we could make a single turn into a double turn and specifically said: “Well if you were a principal you should be able to do a double.” He then proceeded to tell the 4 soloist in the room that we had all been promoted! Without much time to absorb this huge news we had to pull ourselves together and continue on with the new choreography. It was not the most glamourous way for a promotion to happen, but none the less it is a huge deal for any dancer. It has been a dream of mine, and I am sure of thousands of other ballet dancers around the world to reach the top echelon of a dance company.  It honestly has not sunk in in the week since this happened. I have been in the company for 9 years (the anniversary of my first day is Halloween) and promotion to principal is something that usually happens a little faster than that at NYCB.  I was perfectly happy to finish my career as a soloist and I’m not sure how many things will be different with my new rank, I guess only time will tell.  But for now I am extremely excited for the future and hoping that I can live up to my new title.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 3:58 pm and is filed under Tess's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.