Haiying is an international award-winning principal ballet dancer with 17 years of professional experience. A skilled teacher with strong coaching skills, whilst she was at the peak of her professional dancing career, she was invited to be an Advisor to the Junior Dance department, School of Young Talents at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA).
Haiying was a faculty member of the School of the Arts, Singapore (SOTA) as well as an external assessor with the National Arts Council (NAC). She holds a Professional Dancer’s Teaching Diploma from the Royal Academy of Dance (RAD) where she graduated with Distinction and was invited to be a tutor for RAD’s Certified Ballet Teacher’s Study.
Trained in Beijing Dance Academy, Haiying graduated with honour and joined Singapore Dance Theatre in 1993. She has taken on principal roles in many full-length productions inclusive of Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker, Giselle, La Sylphide, Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella, Anna Karenina, The Red Shoes, and Madame Butterfly. She has also performed lead roles in George Balanchine’s Who Cares?, Jiri Kylian’s Forgotten Land and Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Nacho Duato’s Jardi Tancat, Stanton Welch’s Maninyas, Marie-Claude Pietragalla’s Les Noces and Rite of Spring, many of Goh Choo San’s works and a number of other repertoires. She has also worked with many renowned choreographers and teachers such as Stanton Welch, Marie-Claude Pietragalla and Johnny Eliasen.
In the span of her career as a principal dancer, Haiying has performed internationally in USA, UK, Mexico, France, Australia, China and Korea amongst other countries, gaining recognition and accolades from both international and local well-known publications such as London Dance Magazine, Dance Australia, The Straits Times and Arts Magazine.
Some of her awards and achievements include:
She was also featured in an Arts Central program Dance for Immortality, and was accompanied by the television crew throughout the prestigious “Benois de La Danse Prix” held in Moscow.
Haiying’s passion for educating and developing young dancers to achieve their fullest potential inspired her to establish City Ballet Academy in 2012. Since its founding, the academy has trained many talented young dancers who have been accepted into prestigious international vocational dance schools (inclusive of English National Ballet School, John Cranko School, Central School of Ballet and London Russian Ballet School) and selected to participate in summer programs of leading dance schools (such as Paris Opera, English National Ballet School, Bolshoi Ballet Academy and Les Ballets De Monte Carlo).
She strongly believes that achievement in dance, though rewarding in itself, should not be the end goal of dance education. Instead, it should be the means through which good character is cultivated and sound values are established in individuals which will enable them to succeed in life beyond the arena of dance.
