Talented young ballerina dreams of teaching her craft in Hong Kong
Josephine Cheung is the first Chinese to attend the famous Bolshoi Ballet Academy
She saw a picture of a ballerina, and wanted to be just like her. Josephine Cheung Ching-nga, 19, graduated from the Bolshoi Ballet Academy in Moscow this summer after three years training and is currently with a ballet company in Toronto.
Cheung was the first Chinese student ever to enter the Bolshoi Ballet Academy in September 2010 - one of the best professional ballet schools in the world.
Dance training at the academy was very intense and life in Moscow was hard. “The teachers would push you to your limits,” said Cheung. “I was usually so exhausted at the end of the day that I did not have time to feel homesick and had to go to bed very early in order to prepare for another day of intense training.”
Students at the academy receive six to seven hours of dance training every day for six days a week, and for Cheung, there was an extra of one and a half to two hours of Russian language in the morning before her dance training starts.
“Language was the biggest barrier when I first arrived,” Cheung said, when asked about the biggest difficulty she encountered at the outset. “I had to communicate with my schoolmates mainly with body language.”
