La Fille du Pharaon was the first repertoire I ever finished, about two years into adult ballet.
I still have the rehearsal footage and the final run, so I’m writing it up in three parts: preparation, corrections, and the finished thing.
Eight weeks. Ninety seconds.
The variation is about a minute and a half long.
It took eight weeks.
And here’s the arithmetic that surprised me. Class was 80 minutes, of which 40 was barre and the rest repertoire. Eight sessions.
40 × 8 = 320 minutes. Just over five hours of total rehearsal for ninety seconds of dancing.
Could someone drill it into you in a single day? Probably. But at my level that becomes a stamina problem rather than a learning problem — you spend the day surviving instead of absorbing. Spread out, it stuck.
If you’re deciding between a one-day repertoire intensive and an eight-week run, take the eight weeks.
What the ballet actually is
Choreography: Marius Petipa Premiere: 1862, Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre, St Petersburg
The story, briefly: an English tourist named Richard is travelling in Egypt, smokes opium inside a pyramid, and falls into a dream. In the dream he becomes an ancient Egyptian and falls in love with the pharaoh’s daughter, Aspicia.
(Yes. He does this inside someone’s tomb. I have questions too.)
The setting is ancient Egypt, and the whole ballet leans into that — grand, strange, a little mystical.
What you’ll actually be dancing
Adult repertoire classes usually take Aspicia’s solo, or one of the dances with the Nile river spirits. The showy, exotic ones.
The arms are the difficult part
This is what caught me off guard.
Classical ballet usually asks for soft, delicate, girlish lines. La Fille du Pharaon does not.
The hands and arm lines echo the poses in ancient Egyptian wall paintings — angular, flat-planed, deliberately strange. Elegant, but in a way that felt completely foreign to everything I’d been taught to do with my arms.
I spent weeks feeling like my arms were wrong. They were. That was the assignment.
It asks for more than technique
You need solid basics, obviously. But the real demand is carrying yourself like a princess and letting the story show in your face and body.
It isn’t just jumps and turns. The adagio has to land precisely on the music, and your upper body has to stay soft and expressive while your legs do something difficult. That combination is the whole challenge.
Choosing the costume
The colours the piece calls for
Costume for this variation tends towards gold, emerald green, deep blue, or white with gold embroidery — anything that carries that Egyptian atmosphere.
Looking at what other dancers had chosen, deep blue with gold came up again and again.
Why deep blue and gold
There’s a reason, and I liked it enough to follow it.
Deep blue stands for the Egyptian night sky and the depths of the Nile — life, abundance, renewal. Add gold embroidery and you get Aspicia’s authority and grace, which is exactly what the role needs.
There’s also an older meaning: the combination was believed to be protective — to drive off evil spirits and shield a good soul from misfortune.
Begone, spirits.
What I wore
ODD ON TUTU’s Lorraine leotard — navy velvet, which sits right in the deep-blue tradition without being costume-y.
For the skirt I was torn between white and black. Then someone else in the repertoire class lent me her tutu.
It was the first tutu I had ever worn.
That it started with someone else’s kindness is the part I actually remember. Not the choreography. That.
Part 2 covers the corrections I got — the specific ones, step by step.
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