Holiday season is just round the corner. It’s the most wonderful time of the year… to shop! But with so many options around, how do you know you’re treating your BFFs, loved ones and (of course) yourself to the good stuff? Finding the perfect present for the ballet dancer in your life can be tricky. That’s where we come in. The C&V Squad of professional ballerinas, adult dancers and pre-professionals have narrowed down our ballet favourites, essentials and covetables just…
Are you at Ballet level 3? Or Intermediate? Advanced? Foundation? And Foundation 1 or 2? Ballet skill levels are confusing – we we’ve created the definitive guide to levels in women’s ballet. Whether you’re RAD, Cecchetti, or Vaganova, a professional ballerina or an adult dancer, you’ll find that our Ballet Level Guide is applicable to you. And remember – no matter how good you are, there’s always a foetus in Russia who’s better than you. We also asked the lovely…
Should I change my job? Should I move? Where do I go next? Is this the right time? What am I doing with my life? Change is inevitable, but seldom easy. In an ongoing series called Movers and Shakers, we’ll be talking to dancers who’ve made changes in their lives and careers to find out what they’ve learnt and what impact it’s had on them. Here, we talk to Patricia Zhou, Prix de Lausanne winner and one of the first…
As part of Eating Disorders Awareness week (February 26 – March 4, 2017), I asked dancers at different stages of their career from companies around the world to send in a picture of a breakfast meal they had recently, which I posted on C&V’s social media with the hashtag #balletbreakfastclub. Eating Disorders are insidious, life-destroying illnesses that affect people from all walks of life. Ballet dancers especially face demands on their body, not just physically but aesthetically. That doesn’t negate the…
If you had asked Joy Womack this time last year where she thought her ballet career would take her in 365 (and a quarter) days from then, it’s highly unlikely the answer would be, ‘principal dancer at the Kremlin Ballet’. And yet that’s exactly where she is now. It was where she spent the past few months dancing a season of Nutcrackers and Swan Lakes and Giselles, instead of on the stage of the Roman-columned theatre down the road –…
It started with one photo, and more than 6 months later, we’re still photoshopping pizza into the hands of ballet dancers. Anyone who’s read our interviews will see that we’ve made our featured interviewees reach for pizza. But we’ve also posted pizza edits of other dancers on social media.…
We imagine what would happen if some of our favourite American dancers came together for a thanksgiving dinner. Silliness and bad photoshop ensues.…
Lithe and luminous, Patricia Zhou is known in the dance circles as the talented young lady who began her formal ballet training at 13.Even so, a stint at the Kirov Academy of Ballet’s summer program soon led to her sucessfully auditioning to be a full-time student. You would be hard-pressed to tell that she wasn’t born a bunhead when watching videos of her dancing. But it took hard work, dedication and many extra classes for Patricia to harness her innate…