Yuri on ice, ballet and beauty of movements

Lately I find myself (after a long long time) to be immersed in anime.

I heard a lot about it from my friends, saw many fbk posts,

but as I had other things on my mind I skipped watching it.

Finally I tried. And I fell... in love.

Famous Yuri on ice.

Firstly I do not like sport anime.

I have never liked them. 

I used to be a ski jumping freak as a teenager

following ski jumpers here and there

but this is a story from my far past.

Now I have no interest in watching sport at all.

Secondly I loved yaoi

but lately, put it straightly,

 I am fed up with it.

And here we have a sport anime (skating)

with yaoi motifs

(well... there are some discussions if this is really yaoi or not

but for me it was more than obvious).

And what is the result?

I watched nine episodes on one breath

and did my best to not watch it until the end on the same day.

As a few days are gone already

I am trying to realise why in fact I liked it so much.

What, on earth, is so special in it!

First thing that comes to my mind is the fact that it is all authentic.

I  have not really checked it but seems that

characters are based on real skaters.

Protagonists seem real.

What was especially appealing to me

was this nowadays atmosphere.

Checking smartphones, putting photos on instagram,

getting to know about stars from their Internet posts.

I remember that when I was all in ski jumping 

I was dying to know more about them, their life,

having their photos etc.

And here? Here during all episodes

we enter more and more their lives, relations, emotions.

It is like a dream coming true.

Getting accreditation and going inside it

was something that all groupies were dying for.

And here we can encounter it all.

Sometimes we start from watching news and instagram,

but then we can enter inside: their hearts, their minds and know everything

with our hearts beating faster.

And above all protagonists are people who we want to know more about.

They are like real stars we would long for if they were real.

Usually I say they are better that they are not real,

but not it this case. They are better us real. They are real here.

This anime is not a longing to a fairy tale charming prince but

to the celebrity seen from far away. Internet. Tv.

Sometimes during competitions we can see them with our own eyes

but they seem even more far at these times.

Beautiful, sporty, charming, famous.

Unable to be reached.

But here we can do it. They become close.

There are many protagonists here so everyone can find their own type

and fell in love with him for a while.

 Then you are allowed to enter all his world 

even if only through the glass screen.

They were never so close before!

One more important thing for me is that skating is not like other sports.

So there was not only some ski jumping times nostalgia in it 

but also my current ballet craze.

Figure skating is a lot like ballet.

They do even go through ballet training

so I was associating it a lot.

And here we go to my fav character.

Yuri Plisetsky

15-years old Russian figure skater.

He is a delicate blond boy with tough character.

Or rather he is a scared cat pretending to be a tiger.

Russian emo teen showing off as being self-confident 

when probably he is the one being 

lost in the darkest part of his own mind.

In some scenes we can see him getting ballet lessons

from Bolshoi theatre ex-ballerina who also creates his choreography for his skating performances.

As Sergei Polunin, starting his carrier very early, is a bad boy of ballet

here we have a bad boy of skating.

Both seems bonded by the hard rules of the art.

It is quite obvious that Yuri hates choreography created for him by Bolshoi ballerina.

He is himself in "Welcome to madness" extra performance which was added to dvd version.

Free, wild ice dance allowing him to really become the tiger he longs for.

Charming prince dancing agape is not a real Yuri.

But he knows that he has to go through it for his carrier

as Sergei had to survive in Royal ballet.

And then "real artist" has been born.

Even though Yuri becomes big during the Grand Prix shown in the 1st series

I know that the real genius is just about to be born.

The other association of Yuri I had when watching it

was Kirill Sokolovsky,

young ballet dancer with perfect body shape

and movements which seems to be too perfect to not be computer effects.

Kirill

Yurij

Look at Kirill dancing with other dancer

from Vaganova academy.

Seeing this perfection I feel like crying.

I am taking classes in Vaganova method too

and suck at it in every possible way..

So when I see these people being all real

I am grateful that such beauty exists but at the same I hate myself for being such a failure.

Vaganova Ballet Academy Students Maria Khoreva and Kirill Sokolovsky

So seems that I went from anime to ballet

but this exactly shows why I fell in love with Yuri on Ice so much.

No. This time I did not care about yaoi. Pairings.

But beauty of movement. Struggling for perfection.

 Effort put in own body to master it, to rule over it and to make it a machine creating beauty.

Dance, dance, dance....

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