In a spacious and bright dance studio, the piano teacher is playing dance music, and “little swans” are gracefully dancing. Here is a class for the ballet major at the Ballet Dance School affiliated to the Liaoning Ballet.

Founded in 1994, the Ballet Dance School affiliated to the Liaoning Ballet is a large-scale professional ballet talent training base in China that adopts the “integration between ballet school and ballet group and ballet group as the lead” model. In 2018, the school established a youth ballet and performed the classical ballet Nutcracker and the ballet poem Four Seasons in order.

Every year, the school recruits children aged 10 to 12 who are ballet lovers with some ballet-dancing experience from all over the country. With nearly 1,000 children applicants, about 70 of them are selected after professional exams to study ballet at the school.

Currently, there are more than 400 students of seven grades in the Liaoning Ballet Dance School. Other than dancing, these children also study cultural courses every day. They do not only practice ballet, but also modern dance and Chinese dance in order to better understand and learn to dance. The children study and dance for 4 to 6 hours every day. The “little swans” dance and hover, pursuing their dreams with sweat.