Tonight, “Splendid Dream of Dance” Shanghai Dance School 55th Anniversary Reporting Performance was held at the Shanghai Grand Theatre. On the same day, the Lin Meifang Dance Master Working Studio and Ye Yanping Dance Master Working Studio were also launched.
In 1979, Lin Meifang graduated from the Shanghai Dance School as a ballet major. As a student, she won the second prize of solo dance at the first national ballet competition. But, she didn’t choose to be a career dancer, instead, she stayed on at the Shanghai Dance School as a teacher. In 1991, she led her students, Tan Yuanyuan and Zhao Lei to participate in the Helsinki International Ballet Competition in Finland, i.e. one of the four most prominent international ballet competition in the world, and brought home the second and third prizes of the junior division, which was praised as “Chinese Miracle”. Lin Meifang herself won the only “Best Teacher Award” of the competition, which was the first international award ever received by young Chinese ballet teachers. Now, Lin Meifang’s students are all over the world. Tan Yuanyuan is the chief dancer of the San Francisco Ballet, Zhao Lei is teaching at the Birmingham Royal Ballet, Ji Pingping is the assistant artistic director of the Shanghai Ballet, and Zou Zhirui is the dean of the Ballet Department of the Beijing Dance Academy. In 2014, her student, Yu Hang won the gold prize at the Cape Town National Dance Competition in South Africa. The establishment of Lin Meifang Dance Master Working Studio is one of the important initiatives of the Shanghai Dance School in its endeavors to build itself as a “Shanghai Secondary Vocational Education Reform and Development Model School”.
Also established was Ye Yanping Dance Master Working Studio. Ye Yanping graduated from the Choreography Department of the Beijing Dance Academy in 1994. After that, she came to teach Chinese dance at the Shanghai Dance School. The class she taught was the only one at the Shanghai Dance School which won the collective award of the Hu Chunan Art Fund. Ye Yanping not only choreographed dances for students of the Chinese dance major, but also choreographed modern dances for students of the ballet major. Sun Shenyi, a student of the ballet major, participated in the Varna International Ballet Competition and won the bronze award for performance with his dance “Rise and Fall” was choreographed by Ye Yanping.
