Coppélia 2015

I finally received the official pictures from Cheng Ballet Academy for the Coppélia performance. The production itself was on stage on 6 and 7 of December 2015… So, this entry is about 3-month late. Hehe.

Aniway, as I mentioned a few months ago, Aina danced with her Ballet 1A class wearing a very red tutu this year. She had her photo taken studio-style with the red costume two weeks before the performance. And we loooooved the pictures:

There were bright and happy-looking. Aina said, this year the poses for the studio pictures weren’t as hard as last year’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream… All the standing poses were doable. Her make-up was very simple, too. We only used the browns… No need weird colors.

Her scene was on Act III no. 24, called La discorde et la guerre. I think, this scene isn’t usually included in most Coppélia performance, because I couldn’t find it anywhere in Youtube. The Wiki page  said the scene has been omitted on the performances done after the war. On the pre-war Coppélia, I found footages of solo male dancing on the La discorde et la guerre scene. On the Cheng Ballet version, she would danced alongside three male dancers.

Can you find her?

This is during the curtain call:

Hint: She was the tiniest one!

Since Aina’s in Ballet 1A class, she had to perform on both shows, on the 6th and 7th of December. Prior to this class, she had only performed in one of the shows. This meant, she needed to be healthy and fit for all the rehearsals and the shows. This was usually a challenge because of two reasons: first, the rehearsals were always exhausting and the kids experienced lack of rest. After doing this a few days in a row, kids easily got sick. Second, once a kid got sick, the others were easily contracted the same thing, because they spent hours and hours together backstage. Even the volunteer moms were prone to the sickness. So, I was very happy that this year, both Aina and I came out healthy. I think we’ve got a hang of this: lots of vitamins and fruits during this period helps a lot in boosting our immune system.

Aina’s grandma, as usual, came by from Jakarta to watch the performance. She had never missed any of Aina’s ballet shows, I think. She did ballet too when she was young, so she had always enjoyed watching her granddaughter on stage.

This was us after the first show… Aina has changed to her training suit, and we didn’t have pictures with her wearing her costume on this backdrop, because she had to keep the costume clean and crisp for the second show.

This year, I volunteered to help Cheng Ballet backstage stuff. This includes all the school rehearsals 4 weeks prior to the show, stage rehearsals a day before the show, and during one of the shows itself. I think this was my 4th time volunteering.

These are the kids I was in-charge of. They were pre-ballet kids, very active, easily confused, always hungry and very cute. And they were very eager to dance.

For me, volunteering for this kind of Ballet Performance was always exhausting, but very rewarding in a weird way… I got to watch the kids practicing, got better and better during the rehearsals, and it made watching the show was even more worthy. I also met other moms and made friends with them, because we had to spend a lot of time and work together. So, despite the exhaustion, it was always fun.

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More photos, backstage and on-stage, on the Coppélia 2015 photo album in Flickr.

And I’m still trying to figure out the easiest way to post a video of her scene here… Everything is still in a DVD, but once I figured out how to do it, I will post the footage.