Friday, January 8, 2010

Two S.F. dancers to graduate from Bolshoi

Two S.F. dancers to graduate from Bolshoi:

In a roomful of gazelle-like young dancers in City Ballet School's South of Market studios, Jeraldine Mendoza has wedged herself in the narrow space between the ballet barre and the wall and is pushing one leg, extended against the wall, very nearly to her ear as she casually chats with Emma Powers, who stretches with offhanded ease on the floor.

Even more remarkable than this show of flexibility is that in April both Mendoza and Powers will graduate from the Bolshoi Ballet Academy in Moscow - the first American women so honored in the Bolshoi academy's more than 200-year history. Even over the holidays, as they visited their families in the Bay Area, the two girls couldn't resist the impulse to go back to City Ballet to take classes with Galina Alexandrova and Yuri Zhukov, the teachers who gave them their foundations in the Russian style of ballet.

No comments: