‘A New York State of Mind’

Writer Elaine Davie

Earlier this year talented 13-year-old Alianna Isaacs, a learner at Generation Schools Hermanus, auditioned for and was granted a partial scholarship to attend the American Academy of Ballet’s summer school in New York. She tied on her ballet shoes, polished up the stars in her eyes, packed her dreams in her backpack and headed for the Big Apple.

Now she is back, having had an experience that most teens can scarcely imagine. Although the summer school was five weeks long, Alianna only participated in the last week, which was Ballet Intensive – intensive being the operative word (the earlier weeks focused on other genres like hip hop, contemporary and tap).

Thrown in at the deep end, Alianna and her friend Lulu Botha, also from Hermanus, very quickly learnt just how hard ballet dancers have to work to keep ahead of the game. Dancing seven to eight hours a day and 11 hours the day before a final stage performance, her toes were soon bleeding and her legs cramping, but, as she says, she had to learn to work through the pain.

The course was divided into five stages and the participants, who came from all over the world, were categorised according to age and proficiency. In Alianna’s group there were 18 students from countries as diverse as the US, Brazil, Venezuela, Sweden and, of course, South Africa. A typical day was made up of 40-minute classes with 10-minute breaks between. The focus was on classical ballet and tango. One of the aspects of the course that Alianna found particularly fascinating was that they were taught on a rotational basis by five different tutors – three from France, one from Russia and one, Iain MacDonald, from Johannesburg Ballet.

Click below to read more.