showed me through her hand movements, I would have under- stood just as much. I wasn’t sure if she realized that not only did I need to adjust to her form of teaching, I also had to cope with the harsh, cold climate, the language barrier, the cultural differences, and all the loneliness, insecurities and confusion that the move from Manila to Leningrad gave me in such overwhelming amounts. Surprisingly, I would later learn that my teacher understood more than she cared to reveal. Her perfectionism matched my burning desire to excel. She watched me with the scrutinizing gaze of a seasoned mentor and immediately saw what needed to be corrected. Although my body was raw and untrained by Russian standards, she recognized that I was blessed with a good sense of coordination, loose joints, a good turnout, long arms, a long neck and a strong back. Under her stern but loving guidance, I underwent the most agonizing and rigorous physi- cal torture I ever had to endure, cramming what should have been eight years of training into my two-year scholarship…and ended up loving every minute of it. Tatiana Alexandrovna became, in my eyes, the best ballet teacher in the world. Aside from that, she also became my sur- rogate mother and foremost authority on everything I needed to know about classical ballet. I worshipped her then. I still do. In her dancing days with the Kirov, her most famous role was that of the Lilac Fairy in the full-length ballet of The Sleeping Beauty . They say that to this day, her Lilac Fairy is unmatched by any other dancer at the Kirov. It’s a pity she had retired when I met her but rummaging through the photographs in her house one evening and watching her demonstrate how a step is done in class every day gave me a pretty good idea of the dancer she was then.
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