My professional dance career started with San Diego Ballet in 2005. I was very happy dancing in San Diego for three years, I loved the city and the people I worked with. However, as artists we are always pushing our own limits so I thought while I’m still young it would be good to see what I could achieve if I danced with a National company. Even though Canada is far from my home country Australia, The National Ballet of Canada has always been a company I have admired and been interested in. So when Karen Kain offered me my new position in the Corps de Ballet, I thought now is the right time.

So here I am in Toronto! I am excited to explore what the city has to offer, but all I was doing for my first two weeks here was looking at apartments. This was a trying task but I am now settled in with all my Ikea furniture in a place to call home.

The city of Toronto is much larger than San Diego and I will certainly be in for a shock when winter comes around! I think at first the snow will be a fun novelty for me, as I have never had a white Christmas before - we’ll see how I’m feeling about the cold by March though!

Even though the lifestyle of San Diego has a laid back Southern Californian feel, the company was very ‘go, go, go’. We worked six days a week and I was used to learning and performing things quickly. The company directors Robin Sherertz-Morgan and Javier Velasco were very good to me and I had fantastic opportunities that are hard to come by when you are a young professional dancer. I loved stepping up to the challenge and dancing a lot of different roles in both classical and contemporary pieces. Some of my favourites were The Sugar Plum Fairy, Odette and soon, Juliet. Karen has been very generous to let me go back and guest with The San Diego Ballet for Romeo & Juliet this fall.

At the moment, we are working with John Neumeier for his ballet The Seagull, which has a fascinating story. From the first day, John and his assistants Radik Zaripov and Sonja Tinnes have all been very clear about what is needed to bring the ballet to life. The sections I am learning are all so different from one another, which I think is great. The Revue sections, Imperial Ballet and Dream Dances all have very different styles and feel like doing three different ballets in one.

Of course anything new is a little scary at first, but always exciting. I will give my best everyday learning from the staff and my colleagues. I’m very happy and excited to see what opportunities arise dancing with The National Ballet of Canada!

My husband Gayan Fernando and I met at the Palais Royale in 1999 where he taught me how to swing dance. Eight years later, he proposed to me back at the Palais Royale. That afternoon, we went for a nice dinner at a favourite restaurant of ours called Rain. We then headed to the Palais Royale where Gayan had organized a surprise engagement party and we were surrounded by all of Gayan’s family and our friends.

Over the last year and a half, Gayan and I spent hours on web-cam with my Mum and Dad planning and organizing for a July 12th wedding in Mt. Gambier, Australia. Planning a wedding can be quite hard and is even harder from across the globe.

During the ballet’s past season, we were busy finishing last minute details and packing for our trip. When we arrived in Australia we met with our photographer and florist, finished the programme and finalized the menu. It was an extremely busy two weeks but it was all very exciting!

Before we knew it, it was the week of the wedding. It was going to be four days of celebrating. Heather Ogden, one of my bridesmaids and a Principal Dancer with the National Ballet, arrived on the Wednesday with her Mum, followed by many of our friends and family. Guests were arriving from Sri Lanka, the United States, England, Belgium and Canada, so we all gathered on the Friday evening for a ‘meet and greet’. It was very emotional for both of us to have all of these people surrounding us from all over the world with so much love.

On Saturday, July 12th we were married at St. Paul’s Church. This church holds a very special place in my heart because my parents were married there, I was baptised there and I attended the church’s school. I was honoured to wear a beautiful dress given to me by Justina McCaffrey. I wore it for the ceremony and most of the reception and changed into a dress from a favourite store, Indiva, for some swing dancing later on.

At the reception, we had a Sri-Lankan ceremony. It began with Desharthe, Gayan’s brother, playing a conch shell and Vinuk, his other brother, playing a drum. Gayan’s father conducted the ceremony and twelve of Gayan’s aunts sang a beautiful song. This was one of the most beautiful and spiritual moments of the day.

We then continued to celebrate and dance the night away. It was such a special occasion and both Gayan and I feel blessed to have had so many people celebrate with us and most of all to have each other.

[Photography: Patrick O'Donnell]

Living far from family is tough, so the brief visits that we have time for once a year are extremely valuable. This summer I was lucky to have an amazing time with both my family in High River, Alberta and my new family in Osaka, Japan. An added bonus of spending time with the folks is that I get to travel to beautiful destinations; the prairies and Rocky Mountains was my first stop and the island of Japan was my second.

My family farm is my favourite place on earth. My husband, First Soloist Keiichi Hirano and I, were lucky to have our wedding there last July. I love spending time tending to all the plants and animals and collecting the chicken eggs always gives me an Easter morning feeling of excitement. I also quite like getting on the tractor to mow the extensive lawns on the farm as well as weeding the flower and vegetable gardens. (There’s nothing like my mom’s pickled beets and fresh greens!)

After being at the farm, I was lucky to spend a bit of time in Naramata, B.C. where my aunt and uncle have a cabin on Okanagan Lake. The romantic hills and vineyards surrounding their cabin make this unique region a true oasis. I did a lot of swimming, biking, boating, kayaking and wine tasting including the winery where my wedding wine was made.

For the final two weeks of my vacation, I was in Osaka, Japan where I joined Keiichi who had been working hard at his mom’s ballet school since he finished the Summer Season in Toronto. It was also nice to be speaking Japanese again and eating Japanese food. I did a lot of teaching at Keiichi’s mom’s ballet school and was lucky to see their annual show on July 19.

To celebrate our first wedding anniversary, we went for dinner at the location where we had the wedding reception last year. We had a private dining room in an old style Japanese hotel with a view of a courtyard filled with Japanese maple trees and Japanese-style gardens. We even had our own sushi chef. It was the most romantic date that I have ever been on.

So, that was my summer. It could not have been more refreshing!

The harbinger of summer while I was manager of the Post-Secondary program at Canada’s National Ballet School was the departure of some of the student body to the Dance Program at The Banff Centre. A few days later I would generally receive e-mails from the students on the following general model: A) It is beautiful here. B) We are working like dogs. C) You should come here to see it for yourself. Now that I am working for the National Ballet, I finally have a schedule that allows me to take that advice and I am in fact writing this in the middle of my third week at The Banff Centre as head of the Dance Program.

As a physical environment, Banff is all it is advertised to be and much more. I was unprepared for the emotional effect of natural beauty on this scale. It is impossible not to see humanity as fragile in comparison, yet resilient and creative in its ability to flourish in the midst of such an untameable environment. Creative problem solving to overcome the limits of human existence is nearly a definition for art, so it is no wonder that the threat of limitless, undefined power brought into focus by the physical setting of Banff results in an overwhelming urge to create, to discover the past and to speak to the future.

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One of the remarkable things about The Banff Centre is its ability to be a meeting point for diverse cultures. I took advantage of this by inviting the directors of seven Canadian and American companies to recommend dancers for the program and to be on the jury that chose the creator of the new work sponsored by the Clifford E. Lee Foundation. As a result, there are 26 dancers here at the beginning of their professional careers from across Canada, the United States, Japan, Korea, Russia, South Africa and the United Kingdom. When the program is finished, those dancers will disperse almost as widely - to The National Ballet of Canada, Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Boston Ballet, Ballet Ireland, Ballet Kelowna, Ballet B.C. and Ballet Victoria. The faculty is equally diverse - Robert Glumbek, the winner of the Clifford E. Lee Award, is Polish, Mandy-Jayne Richardson is English, Peggy Baker is Canadian, Roberto Campanella is Italian, Cathy Taylor is Canadian, Nehemiah Kish is American, Je-an Salas is Filipino, Sorella Englund is Finnish and Stephane Leonard is French.

This is either a recipe for chaos or an opportunity to experience that what we have in common is at least as powerful as the things over which we differ. So far, no chaos - on the contrary, a tangible and successful effort to create an artistic product that responds and adapts to the many influences of the artists that contribute to it. Divertimento #15, for example, doesn’t look the way it did at New York City Ballet, or at NBoC. It looks as if it belongs here and to these dancers.

This does not alter the fundamental imbalance between the insignificance of a fragile organic life form and the overwhelming, chaotic nature of the sensory world, whether that is incomprehensible sound, movement, ideas or natural topography. But whether I watch Balanchine or Baker, Glumbek or Bournonville, I am reminded that the energy of chaos provokes a human need to understand the system in which that energy flows. When this happens in a way that makes the vast scale of the world we live in comprehensible on our terms and at the same time creates an achievement that reaches beyond our physical existence, the result is beautiful indeed.