Before They Were Stars
How amazing is the treasure trove of dance videos available online? This morning, DS editor Michael Bailey stumbled upon a gem: Clips of superstar ballerina Svetlana Zakharova as a 16-year-old student at the Vaganova Academy (she begins on the left—and sorry, embedding has been disabled):
It’s incredible! So young, and already so polished. It’s clear she’s going to be a beautiful artist.
And that got me thinking: What other “before they were stars” videos are out there? Plenty, it turns out. (Unfortunately, embedding has been disabled for most of them—but I PROMISE they’re worth the click-through.)
Here’s one of 14-year-old Sylvie Guillem—front and center—at the Paris Opéra Ballet School. She’d only been training for 3 years at this point!
Old competition videos also provide great peeks at famous-ballerinas-to-be. How cute is current Royal Ballet principal Alina Cojocaru in this clip from the Prix de Lausanne? (She was 15. And she won.)
And here’s international superstar Diana Vishneva as a 17-year-old Prix competitor:
Those legs! That panache!
There’s something irresistible about these videos. They show us a more vulnerable (and adorable) side of dancers we know as mature artists, for one. But you can also see the seeds of greatness in these students. I’m not just talking about their natural gifts, though yes, all of them hit the genetic lottery. I’m talking about star power—that magical, ineffable quality. Even as teenagers, they’ve got it.