The Power of Perseverance

It is rush hour in Midtown Manhattan on a chilly Friday evening. Nina Medvinskaya, 18, has just finished her two-hour ballet class and now patiently waits on the subway platform for the Brooklyn-bound B train.

On the train she sits quietly, leaning against the window and nodding to the private beat of her lime-green iPod. The hour-long commute is nothing new for this teenager, who has traveled this distance for the last five years to pursue her dream of becoming a professional ballet dancer.

“People constantly ask me, ‘how do you commute every day, don’t you get annoyed?’ I don’t see it like that,” said Medvinskaya. “For me, it is my hour to listen to music, sew my pointe shoes, and to just be with my own thoughts.”

A recent graduate of Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School in Manhattan, a prestigious performing arts school, Medvinskaya has been dancing for 15 years. As she narrates the story of how she has made it this far, as a pre-professional, it is with a mix of delight, sadness, and wonder—almost as if she can’t possibly be talking about someone she knows, let alone about herself.

“I have self-doubt every day,” said Medvinskaya. “Sometimes, I wonder, why am I doing this? Dance never came easy for me. There was always something that stood in my way, and I had to fight for it.”

Katia Shraga-Davidenko, an archivist at Columbia University, is Medvinskaya’s mother. Over the years, she has watched her daughter grow up on stage and mature as both her child and as a dancer.

“I remember when she was three or four years old, she said to me, ‘I can’t say it, but I’ll dance it for you,’ and she did. And I understood,” recalled Shraga-Davidenko. “She always had a love for it. But, I don’t wish anyone to go through what she went through. There was always something in her life telling her to stop and not to go on.”

Medvinskaya has been dancing since age four. She and her family moved from Kiev, Ukraine to Brooklyn when she was 11 months old. Three years later her parents enrolled her in a dance class. Fifteen years later, she continues to follow her passion.

But the pursuit has not been without cost. Throughout Medvinskaya’s training, she has had to sit on the sidelines a number of times. From injuries to emotional breakdowns, Medvinskaya says she has endured a lot for her age, and continues to do so as she undergoes physical therapy for her latest hip injury.

“I had a lot of set backs that made it a bit inconvenient to dance,” said Medvinskaya. “I’ve seen what it is like not to be able to do it, to have it taken away from me. But, it has given me a thick skin, which I think will help me out not only in dance, but in life.”

In high school, Medvinskaya’s life was consumed with ballet. She spent the first two summers training at the Kirov Academy, a boarding school for aspiring professional dancers. Upon completing her second intensive, the academy offered Medvinskaya an invitation to train year round.

“The invitation to the Kirov was a very big push into the direction that I wanted to be heading in,” said Medvinskaya who had trained at the school for two summers. “When I was invited to go to the Kirov Academy of Ballet year-round, I felt that I was accepted into the ‘real’ ballet world.”

Medvinskaya accepted the invitation, and spent a full semester training in Washington D.C. Her time at the Kirov confirmed her desire to become a professional dancer, but she left the academy after a semester to be closer to home. She eventually enrolled in LaGuardia and began training every day at Valentina Kozlova’s Dance Conservatory, a small window-lined studio in Manhattan.

Vladimir Lepisko, a former dancer of the Kiev State Choreographic School and the current coordinator of Brighton Ballet Theatre, has watched Medvinskaya train for the last 10 years. Lepisko says he has believed in Medvinskaya, despite the doubts she has had about her own dancing.

“There is passion in her,” said Lepisko. “We all helped her. She was always destined to be something big. She was the top student here. But she didn’t come here with natural talent, but with a love for dance and performing.”

As Medvinskaya works her way up the professional ladder, she says she tries to balance being a teenager with ballet. In addition to training six days a week, Medvinskaya also studies English at Hunter College.

“I love reading,” said Medvinskaya as she carefully opens her course book. “When I read, I feel like I am in my own bubble, just like with ballet.”

With company auditions around the corner, Medvinskaya is working on improving her technique. Although, she says she is not where she’d like to be ideally, Medvinskaya still projects an air of calm when speaking about her future. “The chances of me even making it in the dance world are slim,” she said. “But I can’t stop. I may not make it in this round, but that won’t stop me from trying again.”

Diana Markosian/NYCinFocus