Odessa dancers resist

Two colored blankets are spread on the floor of the living room of a pleasant tourist complex on the shores of Lake Costa (Moldova). Margarita and Elise lie down while their legs are stretched and stretched to the rhythm of the rhythmic hints that come with a large roll of paper strategically placed on a white chair, swaying somewhat erratically.

“One, two, three, I’m gone,” the voice says through a video call from the center of the screen. Four other students, from different countries, follow the instructions of a woman who carefully observes each movement and firmly corrects mistakes. Nine-year-old Margarita spreads her leg and tries to complete all the corrections of her grandmother and ballet teacher, Svetlana Antipova, who was the prima ballerina of the Odessa Ballet decades ago.

We are in Svetlana Antipova’s studio for a dance lesson at Margarita’s grandmother’s prestigious school, whose repertoire is part of the Odessa Theater’s program, a historic building now surrounded by barricades made up of dozens of sandbags to prevent hypothetical advancement. Russian troops.

On the stage where Margarita and Elise dance every week at a children’s show, dust has accumulated since the start of the Russian invasion, while its population maintains its fortification. But these dancing girls, refugees in Moldova, do not stop training.

From her home in Odessa, Svetlana Antipova takes two lessons a week to avoid the level of conflict her student students have achieved after many years of daily practice. Margarita and her cousin Elise, 15, are training from Costest, a town about 30 kilometers from the Moldovan capital, where they arrived with their mothers on March 1 after leaving home to protect themselves from Russian bombing from the sea.

“We started feeling the bombs and we were very scared. We have a small house on the beach. “Everything started to shake,” said Margarita’s mother, Veronica Popova, a stylist and costume designer associated with the dance world. “We were expecting, we did not want to go, but we decided to do it for them,” he said, pointing to a girl dressed in pink, wearing two honeycombs. “I miss living in Odessa very much, he cried last night and told me he wanted to go home.”

The little girl looks at him and with a confused face tries to understand her mother’s English words. “I took dance lessons there five days a week and played on the weekends at the Odessa Theater. “Here he finds it difficult to watch online lessons at school, but I do not have to be on the dance floor … he misses his friends and the feeling of being on stage.”

When Popova says that Margo, as she is called, started dancing at the age of three, she corrects her mother: “She was two years old, mother.” He is shy, but at the slightest opportunity he begins to dance and do somersaults in the Great Hall, which overlooks Lake Costaesti, closed for months due to a hotel pandemic and reopened a few days before the war. On February 24, the hotel decided to cancel its first booking of its customers before the arrival of tens of thousands of Ukrainians in Moldova to receive them free of charge at its facilities.

The girl attends her dance class in tights and socks. He could not bring clothes and ballet shoes: “We booked the whole trunk for gas, we did not know how much we would need to get out of there and we only brought one backpack.” The high chair where the hotel guests were sitting has now become a special ballet bar for them. A little tall for her small height, but Margo almost does not complain and smiles when her grandmother from Odessa greets her during one of her workouts. “I can not do it anymore,” he said during one of the small breaks.

“As a grandmother, she is very good. “She is very strict in ballet, but because she has to improve that way,” said the little ballerina. The mother laughs when asked if her daughter is proud of her grandmother and teacher: “Grandma is at home, but there is a teacher in the class. And he is a very strict teacher. ”

From Odessa, a strategic city in Moscow where ground fighting failed to reach the Ukrainian army due to resistance in Mykolaiv’s neighboring region, the teacher looks away from the screen and manages to correct mistakes: “In other words, Margo, I can not see your feet in time. When the camera does not reach the bottom of the little girl. You want to make sure your leg is straight and your heels are high enough. He does not want his students to lower their level because of the war.

Away from family

Svetlana Antipova refused to go to Moldova with her son-in-law and grandchildren. “I told him to come with me and he answered firmly: ‘No.’ She does not want to leave home, she has to stay with her children and husband. ” Among the dancing children is Popova’s husband, who continues to live in a house near the sea, where every bombing from Russian ships was heard. They call me several times a day that everything is going well. He asks her not to leave much of the house. He fears that the government is calling for conscription: “He is a businessman, he has no experience …”.

“It is very difficult to separate from each other. We do not want to go to another country. We prefer to wait close to home. Sometimes I am asked if it is not better to go elsewhere, but I answer: “I can not start a project from scratch without you. We can, but only if the whole family is together, ”said the long-haired woman.

Popova appreciates the quality of the reception conditions received at the hotel, where one hundred people are accommodated without state funding and far from other centers where Ukrainian refugees are in different parts of Moldovan land.

Through this country, which is the third poorest in Europe, 387,151 refugees have passed through Ukraine since the start of the war. The small non-EU country was overwhelmed by the flow of migrants for the first few days, but the delay in arrival was compounded by the opening of a humanitarian corridor to the EU via Romania, for which the country is consolidated as a gateway. Scores for the majority of IDPs. However, the Moldovan government estimates that about 100,000 refugees remain on its territory. Many refugees, like Veronica and many others, evade the borders of the country where they want to return.

Elise, Margarita’s cousin, rests on the couch for a while while the lesson continues. Take advantage of the inability to face-to-face lessons to get out of your tablet’s camera view and exhale. “These lessons help me feel good, keep my body and not think so much about everything that is happening in Ukraine … but what I forget and feel most is locking myself in my room and dancing freely,” he admits. Fifteen years old. Sometimes he sends his choreographies to friends and says that he tries to express his emotions with a modern dance: “This is my therapy”.

It is 19:30 and the teacher shouts from the screen: “Put on your toes! [calzado de ballet que permite subirse sobre la punta de los pies]“. But the girls, whose faces were red from the effort, held their breath, put on slippers at home, and turned off the pills. The lesson is not over, but for them it is.

Her points, like all ballet costumes, remained in Odessa.