Ballet may draw ridicule from some, but it’s almost as much of a sport as it is a dance.
Ballet requires ridiculous finesse and leg strength, as well as a few blisters and bruises.
All that beauty and grace you see from experienced ballerinas doesn’t come without years of hard work.
It’s literally blood, sweat, and tears for many ballerinas.
That makes it all the more impressive to find a ballerina who’s this good at just 7-years-old.
This is Ilinca Bendeac.
At 7-years-old, she’s up to perform a ballet dance for a huge crowd. Ilinca graces the stage with confidence.
I can’t imagine how nervous this might normally make a 7-year-old.
Ilinca isn’t just here to show off her footwork and balance – she’s got a tambourine to show off her sense of rhythm too.
As if to show off how much she’s practiced, Ilinca alternates between fine footwork and perfectly-timed shaking of the tambourine.
This is a girl who lives to perform, in case that wasn’t obvious already.
The arrangement she’s dancing to, La Esmeralda, is a classic ballet piece with some adaptations you might be familiar with.
La Esmeralda, a three-part ballet act, is itself an adaptation of the novel Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo, better known as The Hunchback Of Notre-Dame.
Like the novel, the musical piece follows Esmeralda, a Romani woman who encounters Quasimodo, the bell-ringer.
You know the rest.
There’s a bit of music history for you!
Of course, the original story is a lot more dark and mature than the Disney adaptation – which itself got pretty dark at times for a Disney movie.
Now back to Ilinca, her incredibly small frame at her age lends itself well to ballet.
It makes her a lot lighter and eases on the toes when she needs to balance on them.
As a result, she looks a lot more lithe and precise with each step.
The audience doesn’t even wait till after the show to give her some applause.
Just halfway through and there’s already audible cheering from all the rows.
Ilinca is a star!
She’s not done tapping and slapping that tambourine either.
Ilinca keeps going, with her feet still moving in sync to the notes of La Esmeralda.
After each sequence of notes, she perfectly times a tap on the tambourine before returning to gliding across the stage.
In all of a few seconds, she does it so flawlessly that the audience can’t help but cheer another time.
Besides her rhythm and her precision, Ilinca’s balance is pretty darn impressive as well.
You need to be good at all 3, after all, to be a good ballerina.
When the music reaches its climax, Ilinca steps up her game further.
With 3 consecutive hops on one leg followed by a pirouette and a leap, she wraps it all up beautifully.
She gets some pretty loud cheers and applause – much deserved, don’t you agree?
Watch Ilinca’s spectacular ballet performance of La Esmeralda below!
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