Profile | Hong Kong Ballet’s Ye Feifei on the thrill of The Nutcracker, a tough introduction to dance in northern China, and a break-up
- From the age of nine, Ye Feifei trained at ballet school in Shenyang, northeast China, before moving to the Goh Ballet Academy in Canada
- After eight years with Hong Kong Ballet she moved to Seoul, but returned as principal dancer in 2016, and has wowed audiences in The Nutcracker since
I was born in 1988 in Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning province, in the north of China, close to the border with North Korea. I’m an only child. My mum is a very strong woman. She wanted to give me a good life, so she worked hard designing and making clothes. When I was young, she made all my clothes.
She loved dancing, especially disco dancing, and danced even when she was pregnant with me. She encouraged me to dance from a very young age and, when I was two, I began learning traditional Chinese dance. She also entered me in kids’ modelling competitions. I wore the clothes she designed and made, and I did pretty well, winning gold and silver medals.
Early start
By the time I was seven, I’d won a lot of competitions and was well known in my city. Three schools approached my mother and asked if I’d like to enrol – they were a dance school, a gymnastics school and a ballet school. I tried out all three. I spent a month at the gymnastics school, where the training was really hard, and my mum thought it was a little scary. I liked the Xun Yan Ballet School as soon as I got there.
It was housed in a three-storey building – the boys’ dormitory was on the second floor and the girls’ on the third floor. There were 12 girls in the dormitory and I quickly made friends. The school ran on a very strict regime. We got up at 5am and at 5.30am went outside for an hour of exercise. Even wearing ear muffs and a hat it was bitterly cold on winter mornings.
After breakfast we studied, then we had an hour’s nap and began our ballet training. Then it was dinner time and lights out. I went home at the weekends and caught up on my sleep.
School of hard knocks
The school principal, Yin Xunyan, loved me and focused a lot of her attention on me. When I was about nine or 10 years old, she pushed me to achieve and put me in a class with the older students. It was a difficult time for me. The older students didn’t connect with me and the students who were my age got jealous and did all sorts of mean things. They threw my books away and one time, when I was having a shower, they put needles in my clothes and when I got dressed the needles cut me.
