Royal Ballet dancer Romany Pajdak describes a typical day in the life of a ballerina at one of the world’s most respected dance companies.
Romany Pajdak, 25
First Artist, The Royal Ballet
This is my seventh season with the Royal Ballet. Before that I was at the Lower School for two years and then two years in the Upper School.
I decided that I wanted to do this as a job when I was about 10. I was prancing round the living room to a video of Viviana Durante, a principal with the Royal Ballet at the time; it was the company’s production of Sleeping Beauty. I could just feel me go ‘this is what I want to be doing for a very long time to come!’
I aim to get up about 07:30, which usually means falling out of bed about 8:00. I have hot water and lemon, to get the stomach clean, porridge or cereal for breakfast, and head off to work about 08:45. I get there between 09:15 and 09:30 depending on the joys of traffic.
I do my hair, change into dance stuff, and then I usually do a 45 minute warm up. Everyone has their own individual routine. Some people turn up literally at 10:30 when our official warm up class is supposed to start, and others need a bit longer for their bodies. I’m somebody who needs a bit longer. As the season goes on and you get more and more tired, the hours in bed lengthen and your warm up shortens before class, because you need the recovery time.
At 10:30 we have a structured warm-up class for an hour and a quarter, which moves from barre work to centre exercises to jumps. Then at 11:45 we have a 15 minute break to change out of sweaty class clothes into fresh stuff for studio rehearsals. Rehearsal time is midday to 17:30. In busy parts of the season we can work pretty much straight through with the occasional 15 minute break here and there. But usually it works out that we have a two-hour call, with maybe an hour for lunch – I have something quite light like a salad – and then two and a half hours more.
Remembering the steps was something that I really couldn’t work out how I was going to do when I first joined the company. But as ballets have come back over the seasons, they are in the body memory. Someone will ask, ‘can you do that from such and such a ballet?’ You say, ‘no’. Then the music comes on and suddenly your body moves. It’s quite a weird feeling, you think ‘how on earth is this happening?’
If we have a matinee performance, the start of the day is pretty similar except before class I have to do my hair for the show and possibly make-up. Then we’d have 45 minutes after the morning warm-up class to retouch make-up and put costumes on before the show. Once the matinee has finished, if we don’t have an evening performance then that’s it, we have the evening off, they can’t bring us back into rehearsals.
If we have an evening performance, after rehearsals finish at 17:30 we’ll have two hours before the performance in which you have to shower, eat, do hair and make-up and warm up again… and possibly put your feet up for two seconds! It’s a bit of a tight turn around.
Sometimes if you’re not involved in the first act of the show you’ve got a slightly extended period to get ready, so you can have something a bit more to eat. But generally if you’re on in the first act you don’t want to eat a lot. On heavy schedules I have a sports drink to get me through the show.
As Corps de Ballet members, we are expected to do our own hair and make-up. If a role has a particular character make-up or requires prosthetics, like Carabosse in Sleeping Beauty or the Old Hag in Cinderella, then we have make-up artists to do that for us. Equally if the hair is particularly complicated then we’ve got people around. I actually don’t like having people fuss around my hair, I get really irritated and short-tempered, I’m a bit of a control freak so I prefer doing it myself! Occasionally I have to admit defeat as my hair can be a bit of a nightmare sometimes, it’s got a life of its own.
Usually the curtain comes down between 22:00 and 22:30. Then you take make-up off, hair out, shower, and then journey home, which takes 45 minutes to an hour. I have something to eat to fuel me for the next day, such as yogurt and grape nuts or soup and rye bread. Then I stretch, fill a bucket of water with some ice cubes to soak my feet (they do get quite battered and they’re not the prettiest things!) and collapse into bed about 00:30 or 01:00.
The number of performances per week varies between two and six. When we don’t have a performance, we have our rehearsal hours extended until 18:30. We get Sunday off. There are a couple of weekends a season that we have Saturday and Sunday off, but there’s always a class on Saturday, which is optional although when you’ve got shows on Monday you feel you need to do it. It makes it quite difficult to go away for the weekend during the season.
We have one week’s holiday in January and then five weeks in the summer. It’s quite funny because most people think we do nothing on holiday. Actually most of us dance! You have to keep it up, and dancing is our hobby as well. It’s also a way for dancers who are Corps de Ballet members who maybe don’t get so many interesting roles to do a bit more dancing. This summer I was working with Viviana Durante at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I had a week in Rome with friends who I was at school with and who are now dancing with Calgary Ballet. Then I was in New York for two weeks doing a Martha Graham summer course.
There are about 30 girls in the Corps de Ballet. We are very, very supportive of each other, it’s too hard not to be! People do have their own lives outside – you do need to have some other stimulus, because otherwise it gets into this tunnel vision and I think that’s quite destructive – but actually maintaining those friendships is quite difficult. It’s very, very difficult to meet other people. My love life is non-existent! But there are romances between dancers in the company.
The average retirement age for a dancer is about 35, all being well with the body. I did a sports massage course a couple of years ago, just as a taster to see if it was something I was really interested in or just a passing fantasy, and I really, really loved it. So potentially I’d like to develop that. In the very long term I’d like to set up a rehabilitation centre for dancers. It’s a lot of work and a lot of research would go into it.
I think that’s what’s quite exciting about a dancer’s career is that you get to have two. I find it an exciting prospect at the moment but that might be because it’s a little bit away away, but I think it’s important to think about it because it will come around before we realise, and it’s a very, very difficult transition. You don’t have the time to do anything else so suddenly you’re faced with a void. So to help that transition it’s good to put little steps in place while you can.
In the meantime, I consider myself very fortunate to be paid to do something I absolutely love. You get jaded, and there are things that we moan about – it’s a dancer’s prerogative to moan about everything – but at the end of the day it is very much something I love doing.
Romany can be seen in forthcoming Royal Ballet productions of Cinderella, Giselle and Swan Lake.
CB