Submitted by John Hibberson, Midway Community Association
If, since the age of six, you’re a young girl living in a quiet, rural area who has decided that what you want most from life is to become a professional ballerina and you’re given the opportunity to actually take the first big step towards that goal, you take it, right?
That’s what Sophia Malina, a local girl, decided to try and achieve in early October of this year. The Royal Winnipeg Ballet company was in Kelowna, B.C., doing their yearly search throughout Canada for young, future stars to attend their school in Manitoba. Last year, when Malina was nine, she wanted to try out, but she was too young. She had to be 10. So, she went back to her home up Hulme Creek near Rock Creek, attended the ballet lessons her mother taught in the hall in nearby Midway, as well as a once a week lesson in Kelowna with Joanna Lige, her teacher there, and kept working hard, determined to improve and dream her dream.
October 16, 2019, finally arrived. The RWB was back in Kelowna. Malina was #18 in the 10-12-year-old group trying out for a spot. She was the only one from out of town. The others were local and attended classes sometimes three times a week. Nervously, she stepped forward to meet the challenges of the audition, dancing her very best in front of the kind but critical eye of Ms. Hoffmann, the Royal Winnipeg artistic director. It was scary, Malina later admitted, but it was also wonderful to demonstrate the thing she loved most in this world – ballet.
The audition completed, she left Kelowna for home and over the next anxious days waited for a response. Had she been good enough? Her older sister, Bianca, also a lovely dancer, tried her best to keep Malina’s feet on the ground.
“Don’t get too excited,” Bianca warned. “Don’t expect miracles the first time.” But every day, when her mom would drive down to the mailbox at the edge of Highway 3, Malina would go along and despite what her sister had said, hope and hope.
Finally, there it was, the envelope with the return address in the corner of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Malina tore it open. And, through anxious eyes, she read that she was in. She had been selected for the RWB Summer program in Winnipeg, which runs from July 6 to 31, 2020, for three weeks of training with some of the best instructors and ballet students in Canada.
She screamed with joy all the way home.
Yes, there’s still a long, long journey to becoming a professional ballerina, but for this delightful 10-year-old girl, Malina, supported totally by her loving family, step number one has just been taken.