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Ballet isn't just arabesques and turns.
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It's just not poses, and pointing your feet.
It's more than that.
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My name is Tessa Kozma.
I'm 11 years old, and my style of dance is ballet.
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I was like, "Oh my God, I just got accepted into the
National Ballet for the Summer program."
The summer program is basically the second round
of auditions to get into the full time.
They assess you every day and you can choose to live
in the residence for the summer.
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I've never been away from my family before.
That was the first time living away in residence.
And that first week it was really, really, really,
really nerve racking, but then I got used to it.
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If there is a couple, let's say, two or three times if
something was repeated in the dance and if I wasn't
super good at it, I would probably just go through
my head and just repeat it, repeat it in my head first,
and then I would practice full out so many times,
so it would just be a muscle memory.
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Throughout the summer, it was nervous because I kept
thinking about that they're assessing me every
single day, they're watching every single move
that I do.
So I was nervous, but I also had a really great time,
and it was a really great experience.
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The move I'm going to show you today is a Grand Jeté.
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A Grand Jeté is where you leap into the air
and do a split, and you really have to kick your legs
high and have a lot of momentum and power
to get into it.
The first position in a Grand Jeté is a tendu.
After that, you send your leg, or you lift your leg,
and you turn it out and you point your foot as much
as you can to make the line look very nice.
Once you're in the air and in the Grand Jeté,
you try to kick your legs up as much as you can
and get that over split.
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You land by going through your foot
and bending your knee.
Otherwise you'll get-- you'll get really hurt.
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I feel like I'm flying when I do a Grand Jeté.
I just leap into the air.
You're just like...
you can never do it perfectly,
because nothing's perfect, nobody's perfect, but the
time of, like, making it better....my whole lifetime
ever since I learned it.
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It definitely takes a lot of hard work.
It will take pain, you work your muscles
every single day.
It's like really hard on your body, but you just
have to focus on every single little detail
that you do.
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You get to express yourself in different
emotions and I like that.
You don't always have to be, like, happy and joyful.
Sometimes ballet can be sharp and angry-ish.
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Dance makes me so happy and it just makes me so in
the moment...just being myself.
♪ [hip hop]
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