![]() After our four-week season of Nutcracker with the American Ballet Theater, I leave for Taipei on Jan. Just to give you an idea, I can give you my schedule for January, 2012. I flew 23 flights in three months, not counting connecting flights. My craziest three months were in the summer 2010. It’s kind of hard to gauge the amount of traveling I do when I’m not performing with the American Ballet Theater. TT: About how much time do you spend traveling - on average - in a month, when you are not performing with the American Ballet Theater?ĭS: Hmmm. By providing transparency through various channels of information, namely the Internet, I believe the dance world can educate audiences and provide a wider view on the beauty of the art, while at the same time attracting a wider range of people. In the art world, and especially in the dance world, I feel the assimilation of new technology is rather “slow.” Though dance has great potential as an art form in itself, I feel that especially with younger audiences, it has a “stale” image. I love following trends in technology, trying out things and trying to push boundaries. I grew up with an affinity for technology and was fascinated by computers and basically anything with a screen from an early age. That means we are on the forefront of possibilities that we do not really know how to handle. Our generation happens to be privileged in a sense that the information revolution is taking place right now. What motivated you to get so involved with the Internet and social media?ĭS: We live in exciting times. TT: You have a reputation as something of a “techie” for a dancer. Sometimes it would get logistically tedious to plan days in advance and organize ourselves in order to make everything “work,” but in the end it also provided good training to handle parallel endeavors. We were also extremely lucky that my mother’s and my personalities happened to fit so well, otherwise it would have been impossible for us.īesides the actual dance training, this education provided me with as normal a childhood as possible, considering the circumstances. Not many dance pupils have a private coach. On the other hand, I feel privileged that I had the full attention of somebody who genuinely cared for me and my dancing. You tend to speak differently to your mother than to a teacher. TT: What do you think were the pluses and minuses of such an upbringing?ĭS: On one side it was a complicated relationship in the actual dance training. Only when I was approximately 16 and I won the Grand Prix at the Helsinki International Ballet competition, did I decide that I want to give ballet a shot as a profession. They wanted to provide me with a choice later in life. My parents didn’t want to force me into dance. We would always try to find a free studio in the theater and time before or after my homework. My mother trained me daily for the next 10 years, simultaneous to my regular schooling. I chose the stage and the daily class with my mother. When I was 9, my mother provided me with a choice of either continuing to perform onstage while starting a proper regimen of training, or continue with my gymnastics training, which I enjoyed and in which I was rather successful. Simultaneously I started gymnastics when I was 7, and attended a regular school. I started performing as the “cute kid” when I was 5, dancing often alongside my father.
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