"I was only 15 when I was offered a place in the Perm Company but Mme Sakharova (principal of the Perm Dance Academy) never told me. I'm glad now she didn't. My head wasn't ready. I would have thought I was great."
Monica Loughman - now 19 - laughs, delighted to be back home in Santry, Dublin, before performing in Ireland with the company that has become her second family. She was only 13 when she auditioned for Mme Sakharova, after training with Marie Cole in Dublin, and barely 14 when she went to the Perm Dance Academy in the foothills of the Ural Mountains in East Russia.
Her courage nearly failed her at the last moment when she saw a BBC television programme in the Video Diaries series by Irish film maker Edel O'Brien. It made the Academy sound cold and unwelcoming but luckily Monica went all the same. "Thank God, I did," she said. "I've such lovely memories of the school."
She stayed there for three years, studying ballet, character dance, repertoire, gymnastics, history of ballet, piano, French and Russian. Only when she graduated did she learn that the director of the Perm State Tchaikovsky Ballet had offered her a place 12 months earlier. By then, she had received offers from ballet companies in Moscow, Kazan and Belarus. Wisely, however, she chose to go to the beautiful white and gold opera house down the road from the school, where she had so often been among the packed and enthusiastic audiences, knowing that it housed one of the top companies in Russia - a company which had grown from the Kirov Ballet, world famous since its foundation in the 18th century as the Imperial Russian Ballet at the Maryinski.
This came about because, in 1941, the Kirov Ballet and Opera Companies, together with their orchestras and great Vaganova dance training school, fled from Hitler's forces besieging Leningrad (as St Petersburg was then called) to make their wartime home in Perm, birthplace of the renowned ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev. When they were able to return to Leningrad, however, individuals chose to remain behind in Perm, forming the Perm State Tchaikovsky Ballet and Opera Companies, Orchestra and Choreographic Academy.
How good was her Russian at that stage, when she joined the company?
"Shaky," she grins, "and the teacher at rehearsal thought I was really dumb. She was very hard on me and I was crying all the time at the start. One day she even called me an Irish spy - I suppose because I kept myself to myself for the whole first year, just watching everybody. But that teacher is lovely to me now. I owe everything I got from the company to her. I think she just hadn't known what to make of me. After all, I was the only foreigner ever to join the company.
"My first night on stage was in Swan Lake and I was great until I got to Act 4. Then suddenly I thought: `My God, I'm on stage with the Perm Ballet!' and I broke out in a cold sweat. Everyone was looking at me because I was dripping wet, like I'd just stepped out from under the shower. The boys were all laughing at me in the wings - they're not in Act 4 - and I started to shake but I told myself to calm down and thank God I made no mistakes. But every time I danced the Snowflakes scene in Nutcracker I had to put my tongue between my teeth to stop myself being sick, just from nerves."
Why in that scene especially?
"Well, it's very demanding and then there's always a panic finding your place. You have to stand behind a particular girl but everyone looks the same from behind. All you can see is a row of identical wigs and you're frantically whispering: `Where's Natasha?' or `Is that Lena?'."
That was two years ago and now Monica is in the top rank of the corps de ballet, filling small solo roles in the company's regular repertoire of 17 ballets. As well as Swan Lake and Nutcracker, this includes Giselle, Sleeping Beauty, Don Quixote, Paquita, Les Sylphides and Romeo And Juliet, in which she will be seen at the Cork Opera House (October 20th to 22nd), Limerick University Concert Hall (October 23rd), Olympia Theatre, Dublin (October 24th and 25th) and the Town Hall Theatre, Galway (October 28th to November 1st). On Thursday 30th only, however, the company will perform a Gala Night of repertory highlights.
I wondered how she had survived her first winter. "I was the youngest in the company and I was very lonely, though luckily my Russian boyfriend had joined the company when I did. And now they're all like my big, huge family. And they're all brilliant. I really admire them, though the boys play desperate tricks on me. They'll open the back of my costume or pin my arms to my sides so I can't take a bow."
And the work itself?
"I've been lucky never to get shoved into the operas - they don't do that to you if they like you - so I only dance every other night. But you only get half-an-hour's rehearsal, even for full ballets. It can be very confusing if you have a new position. It's brilliant though. I really love it."
