“If you have that passion. In your blood, in your body, in your muscles, you will find a way to make things happen. It might be a little bit harder than other people, but you will find your own way.”
- Yeung Wai Mei
Yeung Wai Mei
Renowned Choreographer &Dance Teacher
Co-Founder of Barefoot Yoga Davis
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Never too Late
By: Xamas Global, January, 2021
Yeung Wai Mei has been teaching dance and yoga for 20 years. She graduated from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts in Modern Dance and has a Master of Fine Arts in Dance from the University of Iowa in 1993. Her choreography has been presented by major dance, festivals in Asia, Europe, and America. She received the Hong Kong Dance Alliance Dance Award in three consecutive years for outstanding choreography and performance. She is Co-Artistic Director of McMuimui Dansemble and the co-owner, with Robert Boswell, of the Barefoot Yoga Studio in the U.S.A. Wai-Mei is an ERYT (Experienced Registered Yoga Teacher) with Yoga Alliance. She studied with many yoga masters including Ana Forrest, Bryan Kest, and Tias Little, Dina Amsterdam.
Wai Mei loved to dance since young but only started professional dance training at 20 years old. Wai Mei shared that she did not have professional dance training until she was 20 years old. Before that, she learned to dance at local community centers as her family had little resources to afford dance classes. However, it gave her the experience of seeing dancing as an integrated system where she also learned about making costumes to doing her hair, and choosing music. Her great passion for dance saw her take a chance at college. After majoring in journalism for a year, she took the dance audition and the rest was history.
Besides starting late professionally, Wai Mei discovered that she did not have the physicality usually expected of dancers in traditional training, such as classical ballet. She had flat feet and many injuries due to practice, like ankle issues, lower back pain, knee problems. She was advised to give up countless times by her physiotherapists. Wai Mei refused to give up. She continued her research and dancing which opened up her vision.
To Wai Mei, being successful is not measured by how many awards you receive or how much money you make. In order to achieve success, these are the things she does. She loves what she is doing and learning - learning every single single day. She also makes short-term goals based on her interests, making sure that she has accomplishments on a daily basis or seasonal basis so as to follow her passion.
About yoga and dance.
From her experience, Wai Mei found that many dancers who also practiced yoga were very attractive performers. Her instructor, Mel Wong from Merce Cunningham Dance Company taught a warm-up routine based on the yoga practice. She was amazed because he was using the entire body to dance and inspired her to learn more about yoga. For her yoga is an inward practice, not competitive, trains the power of the mind, and practices movement with breath, combining body, mind, and spirit together.
For well-being importance meditation and body alignment is important. For meditation, it finds balance in a chaotic world and our hectic lives on a daily basis and breathing methods as a tool to manage emotions. The body alignment can achieve balance by correct postures to connect to the right balance.
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