A little more about me and my day to day life...

I figured that my first post was probably a bit too formal. I like to consider myself quite an easy going person so I'm going to try and write a little more casually so hopefully all of you who are reading can get an insight as to what I'm like and the type of life I live. As mentioned in my previous Introduction post, I am a professional ballet dancer at Teater Vanemuine, Tartu, Estonia. I love my job and have a fantastic set of colleagues which makes my life inside and outside of work a lot of fun. We have a lot of people in this company from my graduating school so making friends and fitting in when first joining seemed a lot easier than how others have explained their first experiences of joining a ballet company. Was it? I'm sure there are a few professional dancers reading this (hopefully) that can answer that for me. Within the first week or so working here I already felt like I had made friends with everyone.

I have so many things that I could talk about in this blog like auditioning, injuries, company relationships, rivalries.. But I think for now I will just give you a quick insight into my day to day life and save some of the other topics for blogs to come.

I know that this timetable may look a little confusing to you and believe me, it was confusing for me when I first joined too but the above picture is an average day for me. This is my schedule for tomorrow, Tuesday the 23rd of February. As you can see my day begins at 10am with warm up class and finishes at 9pm. Even though the picture doesn't show specific names of who is needed in which pieces during the day, for me, I'm in every rehearsal. We are given a break half way through the day from 3-6pm which you may think "huh, that seems weird.. doesn't that require you to warm twice a day to prevent injuries etc" Trust me, same page as you. At the moment we are working on a premiere of a new ballet "Snow Queen" so as you can see we have a tonne of rehearsals for just that tomorrow. I myself have managed to land a good part in this ballet which involves a lot of pas de deux, acting like a brainless fool and flying through the air on wires attached to the ceiling.. So it's a fun part for me to play :) Working on this ballet has been a good experience as it has some comedy in it which I enjoy performing as I feel it is the hardest thing to portray convincingly to an audience. My day changes a little when we have shows but I'll discuss that at another time.

I figured that as I get more comfortable with this whole blogging thing, I will be able to show a little more of what it is like to be me and the kind of days that I have being a professional dancer in Estonia.