Watching Svetlana’s video, I find myself thinking about the word arabesque – one of the most iconic positions in ballet, where the dancer stands on one leg and extends the other behind her, arms reaching forward like a ship’s prow. In the video, she holds an arabesque for what feels like an eternity. Her standing leg straightens until it is a pillar. Her lifted leg rises higher, inch by inch, until her foot is level with her hip. Her torso remains still, her gaze forward. The position is both strong and fragile, like a drawn bow before the arrow is released.

The pianist holds a chord. Svetlana breathes out. Then she lowers the leg, not with a crash but with the same slow control as a falling leaf. This is the paradox of ballet: the dancer must be both steel and silk. The muscles must be powerful enough to lift and hold, but the expression must be soft, lyrical, almost vulnerable. In Svetlana’s face, I see that duality. Her eyes are hard with determination. Her mouth is soft, almost sad. She is playing a peasant girl, but she is also being herself – a young woman who has sacrificed comfort, social life, and physical ease for the chance to stand on a stage.

Personal Reflections: My Grandmother’s Ballet Slippers
Watching Svetlana dance, I am transported back to my grandmother’s attic. When I was a child, I found a pair of satin ballet slippers in an old trunk – pink, frayed, the ribbons yellowed with age. My grandmother, then in her seventies, told me she had worn them when she was sixteen, before a war interrupted her life. She had dreamed of joining a ballet company, she said. She had practiced for hours in her bedroom, pretending the floorboards were a stage. But then her father lost his job, the family moved to a smaller town with no dance teacher, and the dream faded.

She never became a ballerina. But she kept the slippers. For sixty years, they sat in that trunk, a monument to a path not taken. When I asked her if she regretted it, she was quiet for a long time. “I regret not trying harder,” she finally said. “I let fear stop me. Fear of looking foolish. Fear of failing in public.” Then she looked at the slippers and smiled. “But I still danced. In my kitchen, when no one was watching. That was something.”

Svetlana’s video reminds me of my grandmother’s slippers. The girl in the rehearsal clip is not famous. She may never be famous. But she is trying. She is falling and getting up. She is showing up to an empty studio day after day, working on the same five minutes of choreography until her muscles memorize it. That act – the act of persistent, unglamorous effort – is its own kind of success. My grandmother understood that. So does Svetlana.

The Music and the Silence
Halfway through the rehearsal video, the pianist takes a break. Svetlana continues dancing in silence. For thirty seconds, there is no sound except her pointe shoes tapping the floor and her breath. This silent passage is my favourite part. Without music, I see the dance differently. I notice the rhythm she creates herself – the way she counts in her head, the way her breathing syncopates with her movements. I notice the small sounds: the squeak of her shoes, the rustle of her tutu, the distant hum of the studio’s heating system.

Silence in ballet is rare. Most performances are drenched in Tchaikovsky or Prokofiev, the music sweeping the dancer along like a current. But in the silence of a rehearsal, the dancer becomes her own orchestra. She must generate the music from within – the tempo, the dynamics, the emotional arc. Watching Svetlana dance without accompaniment, I feel like I am seeing the skeleton of the art form. The muscles and bones of ballet, exposed.