About Naira | Soloist, Dutch National Ballet & Certified Coach

1988

Armenia, where it starts

I was born in Armenia, when it was still part of the Soviet Union. Nothing about what came next was handed to me, and that turned out to matter.

Age 9

Moldova, the Russian school

Trained from nine in Moldova under the Russian standard, which puts the performance above everything: above the body, above the mind. You learn extraordinary discipline. You also learn to override yourself, and nobody tells you what that costs later.

Age 13

A scholarship to Munich

A scholarship took me to Germany in my early teens. Then came roughly forty auditions across Europe over two years: trains, unfamiliar studios, and no. I know precisely what that corridor does to a dancer's sense of herself, because I walked it for two years before anyone said yes.

Age 19

Amsterdam says yes

Dutch National Ballet took me into the corps de ballet at nineteen, and the company has been home ever since: the same casting sheets, the same premieres, the same Tuesday class in November.

The climb

Corps de ballet to grand sujet

I worked my way up rank by rank, and somewhere along the way I quietly decided grand sujet was my ceiling. I told myself I was being realistic. Realism, it turns out, is often just fear with better manners.

2020

There had to be a better way

A period of personal struggle sent me looking for tools nobody had ever given me. I trained as an iPEC certified professional coach, a COR.E Performance Dynamics specialist, an Energy Leadership Index master practitioner and an NLP practitioner. Not to leave dancing, but to change what it feels like to do it.

2023

Promoted, at the age careers plateau

The company promoted me to soloist. Three years of working on my mind did what more hours in the studio never could: the dancing changed because the dancer had. The ceiling I had accepted turned out to be a belief, not a fact.

2024

A mother, a dancer, a coach

Becoming a mother raised the hardest question yet: how to be a great dancer, a great mother and a great coach at the same time, without shortchanging any of them. Answering it taught me more about pressure, standards and self-kindness than any stage ever had. You can hold a very high standard and hold yourself kindly, at the same time.

Now

The work today

I've now coached dozens of dancers from companies including Dutch National Ballet, Bayerisches Staatsballett, New York City Ballet, Opéra National de Paris, Royal Opera House and San Francisco Ballet, on the same patterns I lived myself. Most dancers were never told any of this. It is a joy to be the one who tells them.

Dancers are trained to override themselves. Then we wonder why they break.

Our training is very good at producing discipline and very bad at producing self-trust. Dancers learn to ignore pain, doubt, exhaustion and instinct, and then are asked, on stage, to be entirely present and completely free. Those are contradictory instructions, and nobody is taught how to hold both.

That's the gap I work in. Not motivation, not positive thinking. Structure. The same seriousness you already bring to your body, applied to the part of you that decides whether tonight goes well.

I have never once regretted the years I spent auditioning. I do regret how alone I let myself be while I did it.

The Audition Week Protocol

A seven-day mental preparation plan for the week before an audition: what to do each day, what to stop doing, and exactly what to run through in the twenty minutes before you're called in. Written by a dancer who has done forty of them. Built for audition week, and it works the same for any week that matters: a premiere, an exam, a casting you care about.