Local Winner

by Dia Stronach A student from Chiswick School has won silver at an international dance contest.

15-year-old Chiswick resident Freya Rogers has won silver at this month’s Dance World Cup after a year-long delay. Representing England in the Junior Ballet solo, Freya performed the Harlequinade variation to huge praise from the judges. The competition took place on 10 August at the Telford International Centre. It had been delayed from 2020 due to Covid-19 restrictions, and the return was welcome news for an industry which was hit hard by lockdowns.

Dancers for the last year and a half have been unable to access studios and schools, and many have been out

of work with public venues closed. Although a relatively new competition, the Dance World Cup is a large-scale event, with over 120,000 children and young people from around the world entering in the qualifying rounds to represent their country. Despite being the youngest entry in the category, Freya was placed ahead of a number of students at full-time ballet schools. Freya inherited her love of ballet from her grandmother, and began taking classes when she was just three whilst living in Moscow. She continued learning at Chiswick Theatre Arts before moving on to become a Junior and later Senior Associate of the Royal Ballet School. She also studies at Masters of Ballet, a West London school run by Elena Glurjidze, a former Principal Ballerina at English National Ballet, and Olga Semenova, a graduate of Saint Petersburg’s prestigious Vaganova Academy of Ballet. She chose to perform the Harlequinade despite it no longer being a popular number for competitions because it allowed her to highlight her strong suit in pirouettes. Freya plans to begin auditioning for full-time ballet schools this Autumn. She stretches every day, and dances or trains for at least three to five hours a day five or six days a week, and says that her dream school would be the Vaganova Ballet in St Petersburg. Located in the home of ballet, the Vaganova Ballet is the home of the Marinsky Ballet, one of the world’s leading ballet companies, and has passed alumni on to companies as prestigious as the Bolshoi Ballet, The Royal Ballet, American Ballet Theatre and Mikhailovsky Ballet. Freya said: “All the online classes I had to do have been worth it. It has been very hard over the last 18 months, but this success means everything. I really hope it means I am well on my way to becoming a professional.”