JOY WOMACK GIVES TEXAS MORE BRAGGING RIGHTS

She makes me Texas proud! Joy had to overcome the resentment and jealousies of her classmates.

TEXAS TEENAGER, 17, TO BECOME FIRST AMERICAN TO GRADUATE FROM WORLD RENOWNED RUSSIAN BALLET SCHOOL

Mail Online
April 7, 2012

A 17-year-old student from Texas is to become the first American to graduate from the world's leading ballet school, the Bolshoi Ballet Academy.

Joy Womack has lived by herself in Moscow, Russia, for three years, more than 6,000 miles away from her home in Austin, to attend the school.

Now, after years of dancing for 10 hours a day and six days a week, Joy is preparing to sit her finals and graduate in May.

'Nothing can compare to the rigor and the mental strength it takes to train at the top of our school,' Joy told NBC News.

Having started dancing at the tender age of three, Joy had already banked years of preparation in prestigious American ballet schools like the Austin School of Classical Ballet and Kirov Academy of Ballet by the time she was 15.

It was Kirov that she was hand-picked by the Bolshoi Ballet Academy to train in the Russian dancers department for $18,000 a year, reports NBC.

'When I first arrived here, nobody had heard of me. Everybody thought, ‘Here is this new American coming into the Russian class,’ she said.

'I was put with the graduation class in repertoire ahead of the other girls in my class … that had created a lot of jealousy and a lot of questions.'

Joy, who is now fluent in Russian, did not speak a word of the language at the time and had to constantly ask the instructors to repeat themselves.

'It was hard the first six months, because the girls did not want to talk to me, did not want to be my friends,' she said.

The school which first opened in 1776 has long since established itself as a premier training ground for classical Russian ballet dancers.

The school's tough focus on discipline saw the dedicated teen dancing up to 10 hours a day, six days a week.

And then there were injuries, Joy had surgery on her foot, broke her wrist and suffered a torqued back which confined her to bed for two weeks.

'In order to cope with my rigorous training schedule, my long days I mostly depend on good food and … really the knowledge that after I get through this, I’ll be able to take on anything,' she told NBC.

'Of course, there are always those hard moments, especially here in Russia, where in winter it’s really hard … It seems so difficult to keep going. In those moments I rely on God, I rely on Jesus.'

Joy was cast as the lead in the Academy's production 'La Fille Mal Gardee' which won best student show in the theatre and landed the school an award from the Russian government.

After she completes her finals in acting, classical ballet, character dance, and duet, Joy will dance in one final performance with the Bolshoi Ballet Academy, the lead in 'Paquita' and will wait to see if she's invited to join its regular troupe.

'A dancer is honest with themselves and faces their flaws and imperfections in the mirror and chips away at them. Behind the love is blood, sweat, tears, stress, fatigue! But it is worth it!' she said in her blog.