If Vero’s ballet fans find it thrilling to watch the Bolshoi Ballet in simulcast, imagine how Emily Slawski felt performing on the same stage – and with the legendary artistic director Yuri Grigorovich in the audience.
Slawski, 20, daughter of a Sebastian paint contractor and the student of Indian River Charter High School’s Hedi Khursandi, now dances with the venerable Royal Swedish Ballet.
Plucked by the company’s artistic director from the corps de ballet, she performed in Moscow with Dmitri Zagrebin, a prominent company soloist nominated for the Bolshoi-based Benois de la Danse prize.
“I was so shocked,” says Slawski.
The two danced Balanchine’s “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux” at May’s gala concert of the Benois de la Danse. The program included dancers from some of the world’s top companies competing for a prize considered the Oscars of ballet.
Hers was a role created by the great Balanchine ballerina Violette Verdy with the New York City Ballet, premiered in 1960 – billed as “an eight-minute display of ballet bravura and technique.”
Though she had never danced the piece professionally, she knew the work. “It was the very first variation I ever danced, when I was tiny, tiny – right after that I went on pointe,” she recalls. “It was so cool to be dancing the same thing at the Bolshoi.”
Slawski was actually not so tiny: She was 9 years old when she started ballet, four or five years older than when most professional ballerinas began their training.
Slawski was taking hip-hop classes at Vero’s Dance Space studio when at the end-of-the-year recital, she saw the advanced ballet class perform. “Can I do that too?” she asked her teacher.
Slawski went on to study the Vaganova method with Janna Kirova, a Russian-trained teacher in Melbourne who once danced with the Kirov Ballet. Slawski’s parents, Ron and Marika Slawski, shuttled her back and forth to lessons at Kirova studios in Melbourne and Miami.
She also took classes at Vero’s Charter High, where Khursandi heads the department of dance within the school’s Visual and Performing Arts program. Between the two programs, she was training 15 hours a week, and often competing or auditioning out of town on weekends.
For several years, Slawski had a role in the tour of the Rockettes’ “The Nutcracker,” her mother accompanying her to performances in Tampa, Cleveland, Buffalo and New York City.
Slawski was only 16 when she won a spot in the well-respected Royal Swedish Ballet, becoming the youngest dancer in memory in what is Europe’s oldest ballet company.
The only child of Ron, a Sebastian painting contractor, and Marika, who was born in Sweden, the bilingual Slawski was home-schooled so as to make time for her ballet.
Twice, she won full scholarships to American Ballet Theatre’s summer programs in New York City. She turned down a year-round scholarship – her parents couldn’t bear to have her so far away.
Then, at 15, she danced the role of Clara in a production of “The Nutcracker” in Melbourne. Her partner was a 33-year-old principal dancer from the Royal Swedish Ballet.
The following summer on the family’s annual trip to Sweden, Marika Slawski contacted that dancer and arranged for Slawski to take a company class. That triggered an invitation to audition for the company. To the family’s amazement, she was accepted.
Soon after she joined the Stockholm company, she was singled out for the principal role in a new ballet. But before she could officially be cast, she injured her back. Though she was largely sidelined until last year, she was nevertheless granted a lifetime contract, paid whether she dances or not.
The performance in Moscow capped the first full season of dancing since her injury and came at a particularly chaotic time for Slawski and her partner.
“We had a total of maybe six rehearsals, which is like nothing,” she says with a laugh. After first studying a video, they rehearsed at the company’s studios in Stockholm. Then, the pair had to fly to Copenhagen, where a representative of the Balanchine Trust worked with them for three days and gave them his blessings, a requirement of any dancers wanting to perform the works of Balanchine. Then it was back and forth between Moscow and Stockholm at a pace that would make even a dancer dizzy.
“That week was really insane,” Slawski says. The two had to integrate both the Copenhagen rehearsal time and the Moscow competition with their regular season in Stockholm.
“And Dmitri had a main role,” she says. After a performance in Stockholm, they left early the next morning for Denmark, rehearsed two days and flew back to Stockholm for another performance. The next day, they flew to Moscow for three days, and came back to Stockholm for a performance that same night.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been so exhausted. But to be honest, I quite enjoyed it,” says Slawski. “I loved being really busy and working and fighting. I felt like I really accomplished something.”
Two weeks later, on June 1, Slawski took the stage at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. for five performances over four days. Then it was on to Los Angeles, where the company performed for another run.
The ballet was “Juliet and Romeo,” choreographer Mats Ek’s contemporary take on the Shakespeare classic, the same ballet for which she had been pegged to dance the principal role of Juliet. Instead, she danced with the corps de ballet. But the experience seemed no less broadening.
“I feel like I’m 30, I’ve done so much,” she says.
During her two-month vacation at home in Sebastian, Slawski is guest-instructing summer intensives at her former studios, this month at Charter High, and in July at Melbourne’s Space Coast Ballet.
And before she returns to Sweden in mid-August, she’s determined to squeeze in some decidedly tutu-free activities with her dad.
“Fishing, golfing, bowling – I want to do all of them,” she says. “All of the things that nobody else I know wants to do.”
