When Sae Eun Park auditioned for the world’s oldest ballet institution, her hotel room in Paris was so small that she couldn’t fully stretch her legs. A decade later, the South Korean became the first Asian ballerina to achieve the highest star rank in the 352-year history of the Paris Opera Ballet.

The promotion of Sae Eun Park, 31, came as the elite classical ballet world faces growing calls for diversity and inclusion.

She is one of only two stars currently born abroad in the renowned company, defying years of different training, a language barrier, an injury and the notorious POB competitions, which determine all but the highest promotions. thanks to its rigid hierarchy with five ranks.

“I believe that art – not just dance – transcends nationality and race,” Park told AFP. “I became the first Asian ballerina to be a star and it became a talking point, but I think it’s something very natural.”

Originally from Seoul, Sae Eun Park trained in the Russian “Vaganova” ballet method – which emphasizes expression, strength and flexibility – at the best artistic institutions in South Korea.

When she arrived in Paris at the age of 21, she spoke little French and had never taken classes at the POB-affiliated ballet school – which supplies around 90% of its dancers and teaches a dance style that emphasizes elegance and precision.

But in June, after Park played the female lead in “Romeo and Juliet”, her “star” nomination was announced at the Opéra Bastille, eliciting a standing ovation and she burst into tears.

“A lot of the emotions overlapped – I was so happy and so grateful, and I thought there really was such a day,” Park recalls. “I had waited so long… and there were some difficult times, and I remembered all of that at the same time.”

Seoul to Paris

Park joins a group of millennial South Korean dancers in the senior ranks of the world’s most prominent companies, including Kimin Kim at the Mariinsky Ballet and Hee Seo at the American Ballet Theater – many of them inspired by pioneer Kang Sue -jin, a former principal for the German Ballet Stuttgart.

Celebrated as a teenage prodigy in the South, Park has been dubbed the “queen of the competition” after winning the Grand Prix in Lausanne and the gold medal in Varna, two top prizes for aspiring ballet dancers.

At the time, she was particularly popular for her technique, like jumps and turns, but Park says she always wanted something more and found inspiration in the YouTube videos of POB dancers, including her director. current Aurélie Dupont.

She left her position as a soloist at the Korean National Ballet – her second highest rank – for a one-year contract as a POB quadrille in 2011, the lowest position in the company. Now she is also praised for her emotional depth and lyricism, with Parisian dance critic Laura Cappelle noting her “inner serenity, a knack for slowing down time on stage.”

Park – who comes across as insightful, humble, and awesome – works out for up to nine hours a day.
Her rise through the ranks was halted in 2015 when she needed cosmetic surgery after a colleague accidentally kicked her in the forehead while she was practicing.

She failed the promotion exams that year and fell into depression, avoiding mirrors for a time for fear of seeing her scar.
The only coping strategy was to just keep dancing.

“You only have two options anyway,” she said. “You give up or keep trying.”

“White world”

Kim Yong-geol, a former South Korean dancer with POB, described the company as a “cloistered society proud of its tradition”, with a “ruthless” promotion system.

“It can make you feel completely broken,” he said. “The very last survivors of this exhausting process become stars. I think she accomplished something impossible.

Unlike the American Ballet Theater in New York or the Royal Ballet in London, the Paris Opera Ballet has very few foreign dancers. After the Black Lives Matter protests gained momentum in France, the Paris Opera in February launched a diversity campaign, commissioning an independent audit which highlighted that only 25 of the 154 ballet artists came from the foreigner. The organization was “a white world far removed from what contemporary French society looks like,” the authors write.

POB did not respond to multiple requests for comment from AFP.

Gavin Larsen, author of “Being a Ballerina”, described Park as an “important artist for our time”.

“Her choice to explore beyond her native culture, both in terms of ballet and everyday life, shows her willingness to be vulnerable – which is the only way a true artist can be,” said she told AFP.

Park admitted that she wondered if being Asian would rob her of opportunities. The competition has always been fierce and effectively pits the dancers against their own longtime colleagues.

“We all practice together, so you can’t avoid seeing how other people dance even if you don’t want to, and that can make anyone very anxious,” she said. “It’s really hard, but it’s so much harder if you feel resentful or get jealous of other people.

To truly survive, she added, “you have to make your rivals your friends.”

(Main image credit: Yelim LEE / AFP)

This article was published via AFP Relaxnews.