The natural dancer
By LIANNE ELLIOTT

Waterloo Record, Canada
July 8 2007

Ulana Zadarko hides her face in her hands and starts to laugh. The
13-year-old ballerina is remembering the first time she tried dancing
with a partner. He was way older than her. She’s not sure exactly by
how much, but he was definitely a grown up.

And he lifted her high in the air, so high that even though she’s
not afraid of heights, she was worried he would drop her.

She didn’t know what to do. The whole thing was so strange.

"Oh my gosh, that was one of the weirdest moments of my whole life,"
she says, shaking her head.

She’s sitting cross-legged on a chair in a beautiful old ballet studio
in downtown Hamilton.

Her private lesson is about to start, but the Kitchener girl has
a few minutes to talk about her love for ballet and all the weird
moments she has survived.

Her teachers say she has real promise. They say she dances with
feeling and she has the potential to be a great ballerina some day.

She’s going to Ukraine this summer to train with Tatiana Borovik,
who dances with the Kyiv ballet.

She’s studied at the National Ballet School’s summer camp in Toronto
and she’s been offered parts with the renowned Kirov Ballet of Russia.

She’s a poised, graceful young ballerina. But on occasion, she lets
her teenage side show through.

And, like any young teenager would, she found it a little awkward to
dance one-on-one with a man for the first time.

She was partnered with Ricky Resijan, an experienced dancer who has
performed across North America.

For weeks, they practised a pas-de-deux waltz at Zadarko’s dance
school, the Hamilton City Ballet. Zadarko had to learn a complicated
set of steps and master five lifts before she and Resijan performed
at the ballet school’s June recital at Hamilton’s downtown arts centre.

"I was so scared," Zadarko says. "But in the end it turned out really
well. I was so relieved."

It’s not surprising it turned out well. Zadarko dedicates so much of
her time to dance.

Her parents drive her to the Hamilton City Ballet four afternoons a
week. She takes lessons with studio owner Max Ratevosian, who was a
principle dancer with the Moscow state ballet and Armenia’s national
ballet.

The Armenian-born dancer came to Canada in 1990, where he taught at
the National Ballet School and Montreal’s Grands Ballets Canadiens,
before opening his Hamilton school six years ago.

He trains Zadarko in the Russian style, sometimes working with her
one-on-one, sometimes in a class setting.

"It’s not very often you meet someone like Ulana," he says. "Her talent
is something very special. It comes from nature, from inside her."

"If you get one student like Ulana, you are lucky. It’s a gift."

Zadarko’s ability to dance with passion began long ago.

"The music seems to come through her," Zadarko’s mother, Maria, says.

"At home, if music was on, she would start dancing. Even now, she
rarely walks. She’s always dancing."

Zadarko started taking lessons when she was four. She and her older
sister studied at the Academy of Dance in Waterloo, where Ratevosian
sometimes taught.

When he started his school in Hamilton, the girls followed him there.

So many milestones stand out for Zadarko since she arrived at the
Hamilton City Ballet.

She remembers how nervous she was when Ratevosian asked her to join
the most advanced class in the school, filled with women in their
late teens and early twenties.

She remembers how weird it felt to put on point shoes for the first
time.

"Oh my gosh, what a disaster," she says. "It felt so weird. It’s
harder than it looks."

But she quickly adapted to her point shoes and fit in with the older
class. Soon she was asked to join the National Ballet School’s summer
camp, which she did last summer.

Then came the offer from the Kirov Ballet in the fall. After
auditioning 70 young dancers, they picked Zadarko for a child’s part
in their production of Sleeping Beauty at the Detroit Opera House.

Unfortunately a mix-up at the American border meant she couldn’t
take the part. She found out too late she would need to apply for a
performer’s visa.

"It was quite unfortunate," she says.

But she is excited to go to Ukraine for a month this summer, the
country where her grandparents were born. She and her mother have
rented an apartment in Kyiv and Zadarko will take private lessons
two hours a day, six days a week.

Zadarko hopes this kind of training will allow her to one day dance
professionally with a company in Europe or North America.

If that doesn’t happen, she figures she’ll become a lawyer. Zadarko,
who skipped a grade and has always been a strong student, is taking
a law course when she starts Grade 10 at Cameron Heights this fall.

But dance is her first dream. Her friends at school always ask her why
she loves it so much, and she has a hard time explaining her passion.

"It’s the freedom of it," she says, pausing as she tries to think of
a way to explain the sensation. "I can never give an exact answer as
to why. It’s so hard to explain. I just fell in love and now I have
to keep on going."