How It Started

Rome wasn’t built in a day — so the saying goes. Women in Singapore have come a long way in their various industries in the country’s 56 years, but one thing remains constant: they build on the shoulders of those who have come before them. We speak to women in the arts, in advocacy, and in tech, and learn just how much progress has been made — and how much work remains

- Hillary Kang

AND THEN THEY DANCED

A BALLET DOYENNE AND HER FORMER STUDENT — NOW A TEACHER AND PROFESSIONAL IN HER OWN RIGHT — REFLECT ON HOW FAR THEIR ART HAS COME

Veteran ballerina Xia Hai Ying’s formative years were the stuff of movies. As a young girl in China, the now 45-yearold was plucked from her school and enrolled into a rigorous dance programme; as a 10-year-old at the famed Beijing Dance Academy, Xia and her compatriots would often hold lighters under their legs to ensure they would maintain their form in front of their teachers — for fear of the punishment they’d endure if they didn’t.

“I survived fairly easily, but I was one of the lucky ones,” says Xia, who joined the Singapore Dance Theatre at the age of 17. “But if I was someone who was struggling every day, and always in the bottom — that would kill someone.”

In 2010, Xia hung up her pointe shoes and turned to teaching. “Teachers back in my time only had one approach: You do whatever I say. So when I first started teaching, I took that same approach,” says Xia, founded City Ballet Academy in 2012. “It was not sensitive because we weren’t treated sensitively.”

One of her students of the time was Adelene Stanley, an award-winning dancer who’s been on numerous world tours; most notably, she was part of the troupe that performed Inala — A Zulu Ballet for the British Royal Family in 2014.