The Swan Prince

Chapter one

"Glissade, sissone ouvert and ésemble with arms in fourth!" Bellowed my teacher, Madame Osanka, in Russian. She gracefully demonstrated, then waved for us to follow. Her actions were always perfect, with beautiful body alignment and performed with a beaming smile. Mine however, were not, meriting me many a telling off. I glided sideways, jumped forwards with one leg behind me, then joined my feet in the air and landed with my feet crossed. I waited breathlessly, panting due to the exertion as I waited for the corrections that I knew were going to follow.

"Elysia, watch your turnout." She sighed at me, rather forcefully correcting my position.

It was just another day at the academy.

I had been dancing ballet about fifteen years out of my seventeen, being just three when I started. My parents had convinced me a few years ago, to move to Russia to continue pursuing ballet, as I already knew some of the language and the training was excellent.

 My Russian teachers were by far the strictest and toughest out of all I had ever had - muscles that I hadn't even known that I had were now very developed and the fact that all the training was in Russian made it difficult to understand sometimes. Many of the teachers had had glittering careers as dancers with world-renowned companies and expected every student to be able master the art of ballet flawlessly, as they had. The Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet had trained many top ballerinas and ballet dancers, earning a name and reputation as one of the finest and most prestigious in the world.

It could probably also be known as one of the most competitive - each year, the lowest scoring people from each class were cut from the school, so it was a constant battle to keep up. But if you tried your hardest and managed to graduate, maybe even become the graduating star which was the top student graduating each year, it was a guarantee of becoming a famous dancer - the reason why many parents were willing to pay the exorbitant fees. I myself had a long way to go though . . . I drifted off into imagining dancing on stage in a beautiful tutu, my childhood dream.

"Stop daydreaming girl and get on with the exercise!" Yelled Madame Osanka again, taking me out of my dreamy state. I sighed.

We danced for another hour, then performed cooling down exercises and left for lunch. The halls of the Vaganova Academy were lined with opulent, dark carpets and strangely contrasting bare, white walls. Oil paintings of patrons were the only decoration, along with posters that displayed famous ballerinas and ballet dancers in impossible positions. They looking breathtaking, holding poses that must have taken a a lot of control to manage, and still mustering winning smiles all the same. I felt rather envious of them. Younger children, first and second years, were sprawled across the carpets in splits, dressed slightly ridiculously in brightly coloured wool jumpers over their leotards that were meant to keep muscles warm for dancing in. They pulled equally flexible positions, so much so that my back ached just looking at them, and chatted amicably in Russian, talking so quickly it sounded like the rat-a-tat-tat of machine gun fire. They paused when they saw me. To them, I would always be the outsider, the foreigner with the weird eyes - according to the rather annoying seven-year-old girl I overheard in the corridor, they were too blue. 

Too blue!

I hurried on to the shiny, metal canteen, scanning the crowds of girls and boys eating lunch. At length, I found a blonde head that belonged to Viktoryia waiting at the back of the queue for food and slipped in beside her. She was in the other class in our year and we had been inseparable ever since we met several years ago in my first class at the academy.

"How are you?" She asked in Russian.

"Aren't you supposed to be practicing English, Vika?" I answered in English, mock annoyed.