The Search for Taiwan’s Ballet Stars of Tomorrow

There’s not a free seat to be found in the 500-seat Taipei Hero House auditorium on this Sunday in August. The audience is here to watch the final round of Taiwan’s first youth ballet competition, the Taiwan Grand Prix. Some 175 dancers, more than 90% of them under the age of 18, are participating in the event.

Every eye in the place fixes on each dancer as he or she takes the stage to perform a solo.

Kenny Wang, a professional dancer who spent many years in the United States, organized the Taiwan Grand Prix. Wang has spent the years since his return to Taiwan working to get local dancers onto the international stage in an effort to disprove the myth that “Asians can’t dance ballet.”

A young man in a skintight black outfit leaps and swirls through a portion of Don Quixote, his fluid performance earning cheers from the crowd as he exits the stage.

The next, shirtless and wearing a feathered headband, performs a dazzling section of a pas de deux from Le Corsaire. His confident expression after completing a sequence of skips, fouettés, leaps, and turns recalls Rudolf Nureyev performing his reconstructed version of the piece in London in 1963.

Unwilling to let the male dancers grab all the glory, the female dancers perform bits of classics such as Sleeping Beauty, Giselle, Swan Lake, and Coppélia. Dressed in tutus of various styles, they hold the audience rapt with their spins en pointe and their grand jetés.

Even dancers who make mistakes remain composed through the end of their performances, far less perturbed by their slip-ups than their friends and family in the audience. A mother here to watch her fifth-grade daughter compete remarks that the Grand Prix is even more nerve-wracking than an audition.

Young Taiwanese dancers leap, pose and pirouette at the Taiwan Grand Prix in early August.

A large part of the parents’ anxiety stems from the fact that the competition judges are all teachers from major international ballet schools. As they score the performances, they’re also scouting for talent, determining which dancers meet their schools’ entrance requirements.

Among the judges invited by the Taiwan International Ballet Association, the Grand Prix’s organizer, are the artistic and administrative directors of Canada’s National Ballet School, the John Cranko Ballet School of the Stuttgart Ballet, the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School, the San Francisco Ballet School, and the Kirov Academy of Ballet of Washington DC.

Sitting in the first row, their eyes glued to the dancers, they evaluate competitors on everything from the way they move and carry themselves to the degree of tension in their muscles, missing nothing. The judges are seeking talented young Taiwanese dancers for their schools, and are armed with the kinds of scholarships that will make it feasible for the youngsters to study abroad.

When the competition wraps up, 21 dancers are offered admission without the need for further examinations, and 22 are offered full or partial scholarships. Not many young Taiwanese study ballet, but those who take it up, have potential, work hard, and perform at every opportunity, have a real shot at studying abroad.

Kenny Wang, director of the Taiwan Grand Prix and head of the BD Ballet, followed precisely this formula in his youth. After returning to Taiwan, he spent five years setting up the first Taiwan Grand Prix, an event whose express purpose is to give young dancers the chance to study abroad.

A ballet instructor helps a student put on a little extra powder before taking the stage.

Born in 1977, the 36-year-old Wang is in the midst of what are typically a dancer’s prime years.

His first teacher was Jennifer Lee, the first director of Taiwan’s first professional ballet company, Theater Ballet-Taipei. Lee went on to found the Four Seasons Dance Centre in 1986, one year after Theater Ballet-Taipei disbanded. After establishing the center’s classical ballet program, she began auditioning 10-year-olds for places, offering them long-term, structured training free of charge. Wang was among the first group of children Lee recruited.

Four Seasons invited American ballet teacher John Barker to teach classes in Taiwan three times. With Barker as his teacher, Wang became even more committed to a career in classical ballet.

Wang’s full scholarship to the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School at the age of 15 marked the start of 13 years of study and performance abroad.

After graduating, he became a professional dancer with the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre and the Colorado Ballet, touring the US, Europe and Asia several times. Wang even reached the finals of the New York International Ballet Competition in 2000, and performed a solo in the gala’s presentation of Don Quixote.

Persuaded to return to Taiwan by his family eight years ago, he began to recognize the extent to which Taiwan’s ballet scene differs from the international one.

“Taiwan doesn’t have a single professional classical ballet troupe,” says Wang’s wife, Lu Zi­ling. “Nor does it have a ballet theater that meets [international] standards.”

Watching young Korean, Japanese, and mainland Chinese dancers take over international ballet competitions, debunking the myth that “Asians can’t dance ballet,” made Wang still more anxious about the future of Taiwanese ballet.

Though young people today begin their study of ballet at the age of six or seven—Wang himself didn’t start until he was 10—they often give it up due to academic pressures or career plans. Commenting on this phenomenon, Wang observes: “A lot of young people enjoy ballet, but few pursue it. They give it up because they lack venues to perform in and a path to advance along, or they simply see no future in it.”

That being the case, Wang looked for other places young students could perform. In 2009, he began working with several international ballet schools to arrange admissions tests in Taiwan and save parents the expense of traveling abroad for them. His goal has been to bridge the distance between young dancers and their dreams.

Wang and his wife have poured heart and soul into their work because “we’ve been inspired by the many, many talented kids.”

The mothers of two participants in the Grand Prix remarked to one another during the competition’s intermission: “This event has motivated my kid to continue studying ballet.”

“We didn’t have this kind of competition when I was young, so I switched to studying modern dance. I got back into ballet after starting university, but none of the ballet schools wanted me [because I was too old].”

 

The challenges ballet has faced in Taiwan owe much to history.

­Chang ­Chung-­shiuan, vice president of National Taipei University of the Arts, says that ballet was introduced to Taiwan during the period of Japanese rule (1895–1945). Xu Qing­gao, a Taiwanese dancer who had studied in Japan, was the first teacher in Taiwan to use ballet’s French terminology, linking local ballet education to the artform’s country of origin for the first time.

Chang says that in those days ballet, though still relatively new to Taiwan, was dancing’s mainstream, and that most dance society performances were of ballet.

But following Taiwan’s return to Chinese rule, the government pushed for schools to teach national dance. It also organized the first Chinese folk dance competition in 1954. Mongolian, golden rings, and other folk dances similarly dominated intermural middle and high-school dance contests.

Nowadays, the government’s national competition, known as the Student Dance Games since 2001, features competition in multiple dance categories, including Chinese classical, folk, modern and children’s. But ballet, the most international dance variety and the focus of most international dance competitions, has yet to be incorporated into the event. Instead, young boys and girls interested in the form are stuck studying it during summer vacation or after school.

“Kids who study ballet in Taipei are largely doing it out of their own interest. Kids in the south tend to study it to build a foundation for testing into a dance program,” observes Lu.

For students passionate about ballet, studying it, whether as a vocation or avocation, can be a wonderful thing. And now that the Taiwan Grand Prix has thrown open the windows of opportunity, the dreams of our young princes and princesses of the ballet are within reach.