Lily has been asking to try ballet for about a year, but we held off on it because she has always loved gymanstics so much that we didn't want to have her stop gymnastics to make room for ballet. But since she asked about ballet so consistently for so long, we decided to have her stop gymnastics before the holiday season and then do a 12-week session of ballet during the spring semester. So ballet class started in January. Lily was soooo excited to start her class! And I was happy to have her in a really convenient class and location with an instructor I already know. Ms. Angie, the teacher, happens to be the instructor for a few of the group exercise classes I go to at the gym. Lily enjoyed her ballet class for the first three weeks or so. After that, she really only had very much fun during the first 15 minutes or so of class each week. She got bored with having to stand in line with the other girls and practice things over and over. She wanted to run around the room, and she wanted to hang on the bar instead of just use it for balance. In her defense, she was by far the youngest girl in the class of 4-6 year olds, with nearly all the other girls having done ballet with Ms. Angie at least once before. The teacher continually told me Lily was doing just fine, but to me it looked like she was doing a whole lot of playing and not very much dancing at all!
Nevertheless, the time came for the recital, and Lily was very excited about it. First, each girl demonstrated a ballet technique at the bar - Lily's was the plie, although my picture of it was waaaay too blurry to post. She did a great job showing the other girls how to do the plie and telling the audience what it was called. It's very cute to hear a four-year-old tell you they're going to do a plie. The first picture here is before the recital started, of Lily just posing for the camera. The next few are of her practicing some of the other ballet techniques that were assigned to the other girls - releve and arabesque.
After demonstrating their techniques at the bar, the little ballerinas performed their first dance, the ballet. There is a video of it in a separate post. Following the ballet performance, they danced their "creative" piece, which the girls actually choreographed themselves! Each girl chose a word from a box early in the ballet session, and they showed the class what they thought of when they heard that word. Their thoughts and dances turned into their own part of the choreography for the dance. They obviously had a lot of fun with it, and Lily participated in that part of the recital more than any other piece. There's another video for the creative dance, also in a separate post. Following the creative dance, the girls changed into their hip-hop outfits and did their hip-hop dance. I took a few pictures of the hip-hop, and there's also a group picture at the end. I'm not posting the video of the hiphop though, because it's really just Lily messing with her hat and her ponytail! She had very little interest in the hip-hop, I think because it was always at the end of the hour-long ballet class, by which time she had already lost interest each week.
All in all, the recital was incredibly cute. And we're glad we let Lily try ballet for awhile, but it's pretty clear that ballet is just not really her thing. Now she's talking about all sorts of other activities - gymnastics, soccer, t-ball, tennis, golf... The list goes on and on. We'll see what she decides on next!
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