First draft - Nutcracker article for the magazine

Who would have ever thought that a professional ballet company is located right here in Herricks, right in our own backyard? The Eglevsky Ballet Company has been Long Island’s only professional ballet company since 1961 when it was founded by Andre Eglevsky, premier danseur of the New York City Ballet. It is now under the artistic direction of Ali Pourfarrokh, one of the ballet world’s most sought after dancers, teachers, and choreographers. It is located in the Herricks Community Center with its affiliated school, the American Theater Dance Workshop. The Eglevsky Ballet Company celebrates the holiday season with its annual production of The Nutcracker. Becky Kalman, one of the apprentices to the company, and a student at Herricks High School, talks about what it’s like to dance with a professional ballet company, and what the rehearsal process is like for such a famous ballet.

October 3, 2009
I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many happy tears in my life. Tonight is the night that Ali Pourfarrokh, announces his casting decision for the coveted role, Clara. Every little girl wants to be Clara; She’s a princess around the age of twelve. She lives in a world where every single one of her dreams comes true on Christmas Eve. Who wouldn’t want to have the opportunity to play this part? A week ago, I had been asked to play Clara’s Prince, a role that I graciously accepted and tonight my sister, Sabrina Kalman and her good friend, Lexi Manno, were both offered the role of Clara. The role is always split by two girls to give more dancers the opportunity to play the part, and also to have an understudy just in case. I am so proud of my two little princesses and cannot wait to share this amazing experience with them.

October 24, 2009
Tonight I had my costume fitting. This is the sixth year that I am dancing in The Nutcracker with the Eglevsky Ballet Company, and every year when I try on my costume for the first time, I get a surge of dancing butterflies in my stomach and in my feet. Almost all of the costumes are used again and again, year after year, so there’s a lot of history in them, which makes it really special. Some of the older tutus still have the names of the professional dancers who where the first to dance in them stitched into the sides. Our costume inventory has costumes that were made and worn in the 1970s, but also new costumes that are being made this year.

December 18, 2009
Today is going to be a long day! We have our full day dress/tech rehearsal with the entire company at the Tilles Center Theater. It’s the first and only time we will get to rehearse on the stage prior to opening night. We have a company warm up at 9 AM, and rehearsal starts promptly at 10:30 AM. They give us a break for lunch, and we will probably run through the entire ballet two or three times. Rehearsal ends at 9:00 at night, and my friends and I think we should just sleep at the theater, since we’re going to have to come back tomorrow for the show, anyway. Even though a twelve-hour rehearsal is intense, and exhausting, I look forward to it every year. This is when we see the most bonding between company members, and when the magic of the ballet really clicks together.

December 19, 2009
We open today! Everyone is excited. We have our company warm up in the morning, and then we have two shows, one in the afternoon and one at night. My sister will be Clara the first show, and Lexi will be Clara the second show. I can’t wait to dance with them onstage. Since I’m so close with the two of them, we have great chemistry and I love acting with them. Before the show starts I walk around to the different dressing rooms and wish everyone good luck, or as it is tradition in the dance world, “merde.” When the stage manager makes the half-hour call over the intercom system backstage, I squeal in delight. When the music for the prologue of the ballet begins, I am reminded of how much I truly love what I do. I look forward to The Nutcracker every year. This year holds a special place in my heart because next year I will be going off to college and won’t be able to dance with the company that I have grown to love and admire.

It has been an honor to dance with the Eglevsky Ballet Company and to work with beautiful dancers for the past six years. I am continuously grateful to have been given the opportunity to share the Christmas spirit through the art of ballet.

Tuesday, Acting Workshop

I was really proud of all the acting kids today. When we were told to do our warm ups by ourselves, we committed to doing what Joy had asked us to do. It takes a really focused group to be able to lead itself that way, and I was proud that we were able to do that.

Today was also great becaue we each got the chance to go twice, which doesn't happen often because we run out of time. Like Joy said, it was really cool to watch the growth of each and everyone of us in our peices over the past couple of weeks. Today I tried really hard to incorperate all of her notes from last week. It was a lot to remember but I had practiced it over the Thanksgiving weekend, so I knew that I could do it. I was proud of myself for being able to carry that out onto the stage with me, with an audience watching.

It was also really interesting because today we were being filmed. But once I got started with the peice, and got rolling with it, I forgot about the camera. When I finished my monologue and came off the stage I felt as if I had been spit into something, played around with it for a bit, and was spit back out again with a feeling of "I did it! Let's do it again!" It was really fun.

Monday, Acting workshop

Today in the workshop I got the chance to perform my monologue and put it on its feet. This was the first time I did it for people without the script in my hand. You can really start to get a sense of where you're at when you do this. The notes that Joy gave me were actually things I've heard before. I know the answers to all her questions, and I know the backstory and the subtext, but sometimes I have trouble applying it. So when she gave me these notes, it was good for me to know exactly what I still have to work on. I think that I need to practice it in really small sections because sometimes doing the whole thing can be too overwhelming. I think I need to work through it and dig into what I need to work on and make it more solid and confident in my character.

Montclair State University

Yesterday I went to Montclair State for their theater arts day. It was a really long day filled with information about the school and the audition process and all that good stuff. The best part of the day was in the afternoon when we got to watch their production of the play, Arcadia. It was phenomenal! The play itself was a little tough to get through. I feel like if I had read the play before hand I would have understood it a lot more, but the director gave a speech before the play started explaining the basic plot and she did warn us that we would miss a lot of plot details if this was our first experience with the play. But the acting was outstanding! Every single actor on that stage was either very good or ready for a Broadway career. The girl who played Thomasina and the boy who played her tutor had such great chemistry. The scenes they had together moved and flowed so nicely it was almost poetic. The director also played around with apples a lot. The characters were constantly eating apples throughout the play and I think that helped a lot with the acting, which was so simplistic but also complex and filled with subtext. It was quite obvious that even if we, the audience didn't understand some of the math or science references, the actors knew exactly what they were talking about. The director said that auditions were held last spring, and they cast the show in May. The actors had all summer to read the play and research all the math, the science, and historical references. They became experts on these topics and what life would be like in 1809 for a family like the one in the play.

And one more thing.. I got a very special e-mail last night from Marymount Manhatten College! I was accepted =) (on an accademic basis) It was my first letter, and it felt really great to have that first experience be an exciting one. That news put me in a good mood that will last the rest of the weekend.

Acting workshop

It is unbelievable how much you can learn from watching other people. Watching other people work with the subtext exercise that we were doing, I was able to detect when they were using the subtext and when they dropped it, or fell out of the exercise. We also were saying our monologues sitting next to someone, so we had a real person to talk to. When Bari read hers, I was her "listener" person, and I noticed a huge difference when she used the subtext. There was more of a journey that the character went through, rather than just playing the mood of the piece, and it was very honest when she did this. This was really important for me to see because I've been working on this a lot with my songs that I'm using for college auditions.

We also focused on breath, and making sure you allow yourself to breathe during the coarse of the monologue. I realized that this completely relates to something I had learned in an acting workshop in the city a few weeks ago. At that workshop, we were told to try and communicate and make as much eye contact with the person we are talking to. To take beats, and to take time to look at them and let what you're saying land on them. It forced you to get the subtext going because you're not saying anything, you're just "looking" at this person you're talking to and so immediately you're able to focus on what your little mind is saying behind what the monologue tells you to say. If you do this, and also breathe at the same time, it adds life to the piece. It can add contrast, but in a simplistic way.

Getting stuff done = happiness

I was thinking about what we briefly discussed today in class and it kind of put everything in perspective for me!

Even though I haven't hung out with my friends on a Friday night since September 25th (not counting Halloween which was like an event in itself), the past couple of months have been extremely fun for me and although you would expect me to be stressing out since I'm a senior and all, for the most part I haven't been. I tell people that I'm enjoying the college application process and they look at me like I'm a nerd. Maybe I am. But ever since august when I started my college essay, I've been feeling pretty good and confident about myself and it's because I've been finishing stuff. I wrote my essay and I felt good. I edited it and I felt good. I got my english teacher last year to tear it appart and help me make it a "wow" and I felt even better. I got so excited that I blew off doing regular homework one Tuesday night just so I could rewrite and finish the essay. It gets worse... When I gave in my college recommendation letters I wanted to scream and run around in circles. When I spent 4 hours the night before halloween sorting through papers, and addressing envelopes to 7 different schools so that I could hand them into my guidance counselor, I took pictures of me holding up each envelope and put them up on facebook so that my whole social network could see. When I pressed the "submit" button for the first time on an online application I made my whole family come and watch. It was like waiting for the ball to drop on new years eve.

Needless to say, I do get stressed out. Everyone does. I get stressed when it's 11 or 12 at night and I still have more work or studying to do but I know that I have to go to sleep because if I don't I will get sick. I lie in bed trying to get my rest but I just end up stressing out for another hour. Not a good thing, especially with my tummy, which I often compare to the san andreas fault in California because of how sensative and high maintanance it can be. Last friday, I stayed home sick and went to the doctor. I got really stressed out because I had to stay home and rest. I'm the type of person that keeps going and going and going. I push myself until the point where my body has to do something, such as getting sick, to make me stop and let myself rest. So on friday I had to rest and it stressed me out. I felt like I was wasting my time by lying in bed reading all day. It really made me upset.

I love looking at my agenda book and seeing everything crossed off because I completed them. It makes me feel worthy. Worthy of what, I'm not sure. Even by doing this blog, I'm feeling good because I'm reminding myself of all the things I've done since September. All the things that may have seemed daunting in the beginning, but which now are completed and finished. Maybe instead of writing a list of things to do we should also write lists of things I've done. It might keep us affloat. Especially us seniors.

reflecting on 1st quarter

This past quarter has been a lot about me embracing and setting free the deeper me. I have this reputation of always being happy. There’s nothing wrong with such a reputation, and it is true, I’m a happy person, but nobody can be happy all the time. That’s a superficial standard to have to live up to. My college essay touched upon this, and that’s where this whole learning started. The end of last year was when I started to let some of the other parts of me come through, but I wasn’t really aware of it. When I wrote my college essay, I became aware of it and started to keep track of it. I’ve been more open to experiencing whatever emotions come my way, and more open to sharing them with my friends and parents.

Seeing other kids in STAC open up to their different emotions has helped me and reading what they write on their blogs has helped too. It reinforced the idea that sadness, anger, and frustration are all normal. Fuertzabruta also really helped. It was such an intimate performance, especially when the women were swimming right on top of us. They weren’t necessarily happy. They were just being themselves. I was able to get in touch with this other side of me during some of the serious improvs and during the poetry that we did. I’ve also cursed more than I ever have, and I’ve been more open to saying my opinion if I don’t like something. I don’t think that it’s a matter of me changing. This part of me was always there; I just never let it show. I always thought of myself as comfortable with who I am and confident, but I guess this is the true test of confidence. I can be whatever I feel like being in that moment, and be okay with it. It’s still a growing process, but it’s definitely a start.

I know you asked for what we’ve learned this quarter, and I don’t exactly know if this answers that question, but it is how I’ve grown as a person. I think that counts as learning too, especially since this is such a huge part of acting. It’s kind of like I’m becoming more aware of some things that have been in my library my whole life. I just never wanted to access them. The acting that I’ve done, especially in the last few months, has really been all about pulling from my library. So it’s good that I’m opening up that access.