Sophia Lee

Sophia Lee: A day in a Ballerina’s Life

It is morning and I open my eyes just a few minutes before my alarm goes off at 7 o’clock. I know today is a big day. I fight off the urge to stay in bed a little longer and get myself to the kitchen to make some breakfast. Thank goodness eating is one of my favourite things to do – it forces me to get out of bed, in a way, because I am excited to have my favourite meal of the day.

Many people ask “what do ballerinas eat? Do they even eat?” or comment “so… you are a ballet dancer. You must not eat a lot!”. The first thing I always say is that yes, we definitely eat, and we have to. We use so much energy during the day and in the evening when we have performances and we need sufficient amount of calories from food to keep our muscles strong and also to recover at night. My typical breakfast every morning consists of two or three eggs, toast, milk or juice, and either avocado or some sort of meat.

When I get myself to the ballet building where our everyday ballet classes and rehearsals take place, I head on up to the fourth floor where the company lounge and company dressing rooms are.

The first time I got to move up to the fourth from the third floor (the third floor of the building has a lounge and dressing rooms for the professional division ballet students) was 6 years ago in 2011. I remember feeling that half nervous and half excited feeling in my stomach due to the unknown adventures that were about to unfold right in front of me as I start this journey as a real professional ballet dancer. I was extremely excited to get to know the company dancers that I have always looked up to and dreamt of talking to one day, to be dancing every day with them, and even getting my own spot for the first time in the company dressing room!

I am now in the girls change room and I get changed into a leotard, tights and a skirt. I pack some ballet shoes for class and also for rehearsals that will take place afterwards, and my foot and leg rollers and my water bottle, too. Putting on some warm up clothes is a must to keep myself warm before I start exercising for the day, and for after class and in between rehearsals to stay warm. At this point I can’t help myself but feel sleepy, but I must fight it. A number of years ago I came across an internet article that a woman in her 80s wrote. One of the things she advised to people close to her was to “get up and get yourself to work.” It sounds simple, but it is hard to do, if we let ourselves feel the fatigue, if we tell ourselves we don’t feel good or that we don’t feel motivated enough to do something. She said “It does not matter if you feel tired or sick or worried, just get up and get dressed and go. Even that can be a huge accomplishment.”

A ballet class is where essentially we are warming up our bodies to prepare for all of the work we are about to do. We start from zero everyday; working on each and every part of the body and muscles to stretch, strengthen and train, and to work on our ballet technique. Classes are taught by our ballet masters who coach us in rehearsals as well as teach us the choreography of the ballets we will be performing. In our company we have pianists who accompany us every morning and it is definitely something that we take for granted a lot of the times, but wow, how lucky are we! Dance and music can never go without one another. It is so beautiful to be able to move to another form of art, to let it make you feel something inside you, and have that be the binding agent when in the same room with your 25 other co-workers (or with 2,000 audience members at the Concert Hall). Classes are with the accompanying pianists, and the performances are with the orchestra. I cannot express how truly amazing that is, to be able to dance on stage with all those musicians and artists.

Class is finished after an hour and fifteen minutes, and now we take a break before rehearsals begin. Depending on what ballet I have to rehearse, I take that time to either change into a different leotard and a tutu, or a short or long skirt. It is important to practise in dance wear that is similar to how our actual costumes will be, so that our partners especially can get used to how the material of the skirt or the size of the tutu will feel when partnering. It is now 11am and I might be in a studio with just one other dancer, my partner in dance, to rehearse our duets or I might be with the whole company about to work on group sections of a ballet. At any given time, us dancers might have 5 or 6 different ballets to work on. Some of these ballets will have to be performed fairly soon, and some are being prepared in advance to be performed at a later time. Working on a ballet means that first we would have to learn the steps (the choreography) along with the music, work on the corrections we receive from our ballet masters, and eventually get to the dancing level that is “performance ready”. Busiest time of the season for us is usually November and December where Nutcracker is happening and different tours are happening as well. Our ballet company, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet has always been and is known for touring extensively across Canada, the U.S., as well as throughout Europe and Asia. We are proud to be carrying on this legacy and as much as touring can be difficult sometimes, we all enjoy it. The difficulties of touring can be found in areas like having to spend hours sitting on the bus or airplanes and having to perform the same night, finding the right food to eat when we are in an unfamiliar area or in a smaller town, not being able to sleep in our own beds and not having the freedom to do laundry when we need (especially on those 5 week long tours away from home). However, touring also has its own charming perks. We get to travel a lot to different places and even have days off where we get to explore the city or the country. We get to see and perform in many different theatres (many of them in the United States and Europe are quite old and beautiful with lots of tradition). On tour we often feel even more like a “big family” because everybody has to work together and come together to survive the tough times and help each other with whatever unexpected events that might come up. Although by now I have started to absolutely detest packing and unpacking for the trips, I still look forward to touring and getting to share our stage with different audience members throughout the world.

*RWB Club Manaco Shoot – Photo by Rejean Brandt*

I have been in rehearsals with many people; including senior members who have been a part of the company for a long time, young trainee dancers who have just graduated from the ballet school, dance legends and choreographers, as well as different ballet teachers and coaches. All of them have given me something unique and truly precious to hold on to, and all of them wanted me to do well. I remember when I joined the company for the first time six years ago, I was eager, scared, almost in denial of my dream actually coming true, naive, and I had a lot to learn. I had lots to learn not only in dance technique but in what it means to be professional, what it means to be encouraging to others but being humble, and never thinking that you’ve mastered something. I’ve learned that you always have to remain in the position of a student, because you always want to be improving and questioning and listening. The senior members of the company led me well and taught me many things, very fast. Some of the lessons were learnt the hard way but I believe those are needed, as long as you don’t take them personally and you understand the fact that people around you want to help you, not hurt you. I feel grateful about then and now, that I could spend that time with those specific people in those specific places because they were teachers to me, they showed me with action what kind of a dancer I want to strive to be, and they believed in me.

When my day at the ballet is over, it is usually 6 o’clock in the evening. In the winter by 4 o’clock it is already dark out and you know you will have to walk home through the snow, not able to tell if it is 6am or 6pm. But that’s okay. I feel because Winnipeg is so cold in the winters and the winters are so long (usually starting in October and lasting until April) it actually makes me feel good to be inside, working, focusing on dance during our work hours. If it was sunny and hot out all the time, I feel I would have trouble focusing on my work, wanting to be outside. At this hour my body is tired and so is my brain. Some days we spend the whole day learning new works and our brains use lots of power and energy which makes us feel even more tired than usual. I miss the days back when I was a student, younger, and my body never hurt very much the next morning when I woke up. It is definitely not the case for me these days but I accept it gladly, as it is just one of the things I have to bear with. The reward, however, is much greater. I get to live my life doing what I absolutely love to do. I am living my dreams, I tell people around me. I am a ballet dancer and dance to me is like real magic. Not like the magic tricks you might see on TV, but it is real magic that has the capacity to move you. Dancing gives you chills. It has charisma, it makes you learn what it is like to push yourself to the very limit every day, and it can relate to the deepest human emotions that we all feel, but are too afraid to speak about. I am thankful everyday of the opportunities I get to come in to the ballet building, to learn, to sweat, and to try to reach something beautiful. My humble goal is to work hard on what is given to me and so that when I look back at myself at the end of this short career, I can proudly say I don’t regret anything I have given or done.

My name is Sophia Soyeon Lee and I was born in Anyang, South Korea. I now live in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada where I am a principal ballet dancer with The Royal Winnipeg Ballet. I hope that the next time you might be considering to go to a symphony concert or a ballet performance that you will go. And when you are there, you will think about what the artist’s day must have been like to prepare for that very performance, and their whole life that has been dedicated to becoming an artist that he or she is today.

Sophia Lee’s photo gallery