Alayna Wong

Alayna Wong is a 4th-year Ballet Pedagogy major at the University of Oklahoma. Nearing two decades of ballet experience, she hopes to showcase ballet’s beauty as an art form.

interview by Kaella Glenn and Anthony Nguyen

photography by Victor Nguyen and Tristan Timog

Why ballet? What drew you to this style of dance?

It’s the first one that I grew up with. The studio that my mom put me in offered everything. Ballet, tap, modern, jazz, lyrical, musical theater, all things. And for some reason, ballet was the only one that I liked as a kid. As I got older, I realized I had to be able to do everything in order to succeed out there in the dance world. You have to be versatile, you have to be capable of everything.

And then, as I took those classes, I started to appreciate them more. And I won’t say that I’m bad at them necessarily. But without sounding too cliché, ballet makes me feel beautiful when I dance. At the same time, I think that the lines and the shapes and the movements that we can do with our bodies in ballet just take your breath away when they’re done well. Instagram was full of videos of people dancing, and I have this feeling of “Wow, I would love to be doing that on stage with them.”

The euphoria that it provides me, I can’t get from any other style of dance. All the other styles are great. Jazz is very fun. I’m really bad at tap. Modern dance has a lot of cool acrobatics. Ballet is different, and I think that’s just what attracted me the most.

What has your journey looked like so far?

I started at a small school, like a community center. And my mom signed me up for the Huntington Academy of Dance, in California.

And then, we moved to Washington in 2014, where I joined a professional-level ballet school. It was a different style that I wasn’t used to, but it was good to have that training. Then, I joined Oklahoma City Ballet for a year as a trainee, where I was basically an unpaid intern.

The University of Oklahoma has one of the top-rated ballet programs in the nation, and since I was already here for a year, I could qualify for resident tuition. I was like, “Let’s see what happens” and I got in. And it was the best decision I’ve ever made.

The School of Dance has provided me with four more years of really good training. I feel that I’ve improved a lot as a dancer, as well as done a lot of networking. I’ve connected with artistic directors and companies. I’ve gotten to do so many performances that I would have never dreamed of doing before.

What do you hope to achieve as a ballerina, both short-term and long-term goals?

I would love to just dance full time. I used to say that I wanted to dance professionally, but in the last year or two, I’ve had the chance to do that in different capacities. I was a guest artist for the Nutcracker in a school in Arkansas. I was really lucky to book that gig.

That taste of being onstage. Of thinking that somebody paid me to do this and it’s all I have to focus on? I want to do more of it. I would love to just do that full-time. As long as I can. As long as my body will hold.

I also love teaching. I’m actually majoring in ballet pedagogy. We have a performance track and a pedagogy track in ballet. The two majors are very similar. But I also learned how to teach, as well as some classes in psychology and all these things. I feel that teaching comes quite naturally to me.

And I also enjoy choreography. I’ve been selected to present in the Young Choreographers Showcase on campus for three years in a row, which has been really cool.

There’s a lot to do out there. I love the arts administration side, which is why I’m going for a business minor. Not the accounting stuff, I won’t lie, but the management stuff is very interesting to me. There’s a lot I can do outside of just performing. I just want to be involved in the dance world for as long as possible.

What are your thoughts on choreography, and how is it different from regular performance? Which one do you prefer?

I prefer performing. Ballet dancers, we like being told what to do. We like being given the rules and rigidity as a culture, it’s how we are. We don’t like being told to make up our own steps. Improvisation is one of the scariest things on the planet, but I like the freedom that choreography gives.

I feel like I need more practice at it. I always think “Do people like that? Do they think that was okay? Was that boring? Was that visually interesting or not?” I would love to continue practicing choreography on other people in different styles, different numbers of people. But right now, I’m very focused on performing, because, frankly, my body can only handle it for so long.

You also said that you have taught ballet before, right?

I came to OU because they offer a ballet pedagogy track. I’ve studied under teachers who taught because they didn’t make it in the ballet world, so they’re bitter about it. I’ve also taken classes from teachers who succeeded but they were so naturally gifted that they don’t know how to tell you how to do it. They’re just like, “Just do it.”

So I was like, “How do you actually communicate the information and guide them throughout time to hit these milestones and goals?” In my head, I think that a teacher should have traveled the path that they’re guiding students along. Because if you’ve never been there, how are you going to push students to get there? I love performing and teaching, so my goal is to be a teacher after I stop performing professionally.

I think it’s important to teach correctly in order to raise the next generation of dancers in a non-toxic environment. And we’re working on that right now. My generation is saying “Hey, that’s not right” or “That’s not how you should say things.” So I’m excited to see where I can take that.

You’ve mentioned that because you were brought up in an Asian culture, it somewhat prepared you for the world of ballet. Could you elaborate further on that?

Traditionally, Chinese upbringing is quite strict. I got spanked as a kid, and that was normal to me. And my mom held me to very high standards when it came to everything, not just academics.

When it comes to ballet, it’s the same kind of idea. The first school that I went to, they were actually very nice. They were very American, and the culture was like “Only put your body to where it goes” and “Oh, I think you could do that better.” I think that’s healthy, that’s great. But when I went to the other school in Washington, that was run by a Russian teacher, who was more stereotypical.

When you think of a toxic ballet school, it’s usually because they have a European-type training background. They’d get loud, or in the olden days, they’d hold a cigarette under your leg to make sure you didn’t drop it or hit you with a staff. They don’t do that anymore, though.

I’m not condoning that at all, but ballet standards are strict.

Ballet is very rigid, and you have to push hard for the results. If you aren’t going to push yourself, the teachers are going to push you. For me, getting yelled at by the teachers, I’m okay. Yeah, sure, I get that at home. But when I’m reading about people going back and addressing the toxic environment of ballet education, I guess I didn’t realize how much it didn’t affect me.

Your parents are both engineers. Was there any kind of turmoil between your decision to strive towards becoming a professional ballerina? Were there any STEM expectations they may have had for you?

Not at all, and I’m grateful for my parents for that. But the opposition came more from my grandparents and my extended family. Especially when I made the decision to come to college for a dance degree. Because my family, especially my mom’s side, has given her a lot of trash talk for allowing me to make those decisions. I have two sisters, and all three of us dance. They’re like, “Why are you letting your kids go into a field that doesn’t make money.”

And my mom actually told them “Our parents brought us to America to give us a better life, to give us more hope for a successful future. "

"We came here to have better opportunities, and I’m giving those opportunities to my kids.”

I’m not doing it for the money. I’m really grateful and blessed to be in a position where I don’t have to do it for the money, if that makes sense. I’ve fully planned to support myself when I’m out there. I know how much the starting salary is going to be. I’m looking at the cost of living in whatever city. I understand ballet dancers typically have to have a second job. I’m okay with that. Whatever it takes to fulfill this as a career.

Years from now, how would you like to look back on your career as a dancer?

Ultimately, I perform for myself. I perform because it makes me happy. But I also do this because it makes other people happy. The people in the audience. I want them to see me perform and to feel something from it. If I’m performing a happy scene, if it’s a wedding scene in a ballet, I want them to be happy and joyous. Or if it’s Giselle and its death scene. There’s a power in storytelling, that comes from movement and not from words. To evoke these feelings in people without having to tell them to feel a certain way.

What does passion mean to you?

I think I would define passion as the utmost desire and love for something, or someone if you want to define it that way.

Imagine you have a passion for something, but you have to quench it for something else, whether that’s your career or other circumstances. You’re always going to have that passion and the flame can be fed. You know, I think that it’s really cool that people have the capability to do that.