Kwok Min Yi is probably the most focused 27-year-old Singaporean I have ever met.

In terms of local academic qualifications, she's only got O-Level certification.

But on Friday (Dec. 6) evening, she took to the Esplanade theatre stage for the first time as Odette/Odile, the leading swan princess role in "Swan Lake", known to be one of the longest and technically-challenging full-length classical ballets.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B5uWPOUhXWL/

You can get a glimpse of her in this teaser:

And thanks to her steely focus, decades of hard work and a village of support at every step of the way, she will come next year be making history as Singapore's very first homegrown female principal dancer at our national ballet company, the Singapore Dance Theatre (SDT).

I meet Kwok over her lunch break after the company's morning ballet class, followed almost immediately by a 45-minute intensive rehearsal of her key dance scenes — these include two pas de deux (dance for two), one of which features a coda with the famous 32 fouetté turns Odile performs at the castle ball.

You can watch that performed by the Royal Ballet here, if you're interested — in this case, Odile (danced by Marianela Nuñez) does 26 instead of 32, because some of her turns are double and triple pirouettes:

But I digress. You can watch a snippet of the scene in Act II where Odette meets Prince Siegfried for the first time:

Prioritising ballet from the very beginning

Kwok, the second of three dancing daughters, started ballet classes at the Singapore Ballet Academy as soon as she was allowed to, inspired by her older sister Min Li.

So focused she was in ballet that she recalls completely misunderstanding one of her Secondary 4 teachers at the Singapore Chinese Girls' School who was gently trying to remind her to "prioritise" aspects of her life more carefully — in view, of course, of that being her O-Level examination year.

"I remember her saying, 'you need to prioritise your work, you need to put your priorities right' because she knows that I do a lot of dancing outside — but then for me I felt like I already did the prioritising because I already prioritised ballet first! But I think she didn't know so she told me that, but at that time I was really thinking 'oh but I've already prioritised!'

I mean I was much younger so I really wasn't thinking like oh, which part was it? Did I prioritise wrongly or not? I was thinking, cause she was like 'oh you need to prioritise like, your time between your studies and your dance', and so I was like oh okay! I think I have prioritised. I was innocently thinking oh ok! Got it!"

She laughs as she recounts this memory, which admittedly is quite some time in her past — Kwok hasn't stepped back into a normal classroom since end-2012, following a three-year stint she spent at the English National Ballet School (ENBS) on a National Arts Council overseas scholarship — which she applied for after she secured a place there.

She says her time at ENBS didn't feel like school at all either — their diploma programme did come with lessons in dance history, nutrition, performance psychology and choreography, but as she describes it with relish,

"We danced a lot — from 8:30 to 6:30 every day — it was tough on the body, but I never felt like it was something I didn't want to do. I really liked it; I was really happy, like I can do this every day! I don't need to go to school! Every day I wake up, I just need to dance!"

And it wasn't anywhere near as easy as she makes it sound — getting into the school cohort is wicked tough, and batches of up to 20-something students are cut every year after rigorous assessment. Kwok's batch, for instance, started with 18 girls and nine boys, and she graduated as one of about 12 remaining dancers.

But not once did she ever show signs of doubting the punishing path she had chosen with such steely determination — which comes through clearly despite her gentle disposition and soft, lilting speech. In fact, she said going to ENBS was "just the beginning... so I cannot give up at the beginning! Right??"

The beginning of an impressive career

The beginning of a professional career, certainly, but prior to that Kwok had already been setting herself up for it over more than a decade of dance, examinations and international competitions like the prestigious Royal Academy of Dance-organised Genee International Ballet Competition, which Singapore hosted in 2009 and she came in as a finalist for.

At the age of 16 going on 17, she already approached all these big changes in her life with a certainty one rarely sees in a Singaporean her age making the call to abandon the traditional Singaporean A-Level/university degree/find an office job track.

"I was like, this has to work out. I have to make this work. There's no way back for me, I feel, so I was like, this is an amazing opportunity so I'm going to take it and I'm going to go for it."

And when she graduated from ENBS with a Trinity College diploma in professional dance (Level 6), Kwok says she was looking to return home, and so wrote to SDT Artistic Director Janek Schergen to request an audition. He accepted her, and she joined as an apprentice in November 2012.

Two years later, she was promoted to Artist, and worked her way up the ranks over the five years that followed, doing her time in the corps de ballet (literally translated from French as "the body of the ballet", a group of dancers who are not soloists), but also taking more and more solo roles whenever the opportunities to do so were presented to her.

At the beginning of this year, she was promoted again to First Artist, joining fellow Singaporeans Chua Bi Ru and Elaine Heng.

All this time, though, she tells me she never particularly thought about how to become a principal dancer, or that she even specifically wanted to become principal.

"... normally how I work, I work the same way, whatever the opportunities are they give to me I will seize it and do my best, so — it's just like all dancers: we do our best, we're always striving for perfection, even though perfection in ballet is hard to achieve, like you can't but you want to be as close to (it) — and it's an ongoing journey, it's not ever going to get there so to say, but we always hope that it's going to happen. So yeah, I'll just keep working on it, trying to improve myself...

So I wasn't thinking like, okay I must be this or I must be that — then you're just putting a lot of unnecessary pressure on yourself. So I just take it one step at a time."

"Swan Lake" was her second principal role this year

And while the announcement of Kwok's promotion this month is a big deal, the writing has perhaps been on the wall for some time now.

Earlier this year, she debuted in her first full-length principal role as the feisty Kitri in "Don Quixote":

And while "Don Quixote" is a shorter ballet than "Swan Lake", Kwok says the energies channelled into both roles are equivalently intensive — Kitri is on from the very beginning of the ballet, while Odette only appears from Act Two.

Also, both, she notes, have to do 32 fouettés! This crazy version performed by San Francisco ballet principal Maria Kochetkova involves her changing her spots (i.e. facing different directions) as she turns. Not necessary, but super impressive.

Performance-wise, Kwok says, she feels like Kitri and Odette/Odile are both very similar and very different roles.

"They're both story ballets so they're similar in a way but different, because they both involve acting and she (Kitri) also has a lot of different changes in her expression or feeling even though it's clearly one girl.

For instance when she has to marry someone she doesn't want, then she has to show (it). But when she's with the person she likes and when she's like fighting with her dad or with her girlfriends or whatever, these different parts have to come through — so it's one person but it's many facets of the one person.

And now this ("Swan Lake") is two girls, but then you have to be this girl or this girl. So that's where I draw similarities, because even though she's (Kitri's) one person she has to be different at different points, so same as this one (Odette/Odile). One girl but two characters."

Not much of a talker, but a very hard worker

But as forthcoming as Kwok is when talking about character analysis, ballet repertoire and her enthusiasm for dance, she struggles to articulate how she feels about making history in Singapore, and for the path she is forging for Singaporean ballet dancers — in a small way perhaps, in the footsteps of the legendary late Goh Choo San, his older sister Goh Soo Khim who co-founded SDT, and Singapore's first-ever Singaporean principal dancer Jeffrey Tan.

She manages "honoured" and "happy", as she reflects with amusement the comparisons people have made between her and Chihiro Uchida, SDT's current principal dancer, who has since earlier this year stopped dancing when she became pregnant (she gave birth to a baby girl, Kiyora, with her husband and fellow SDT principal Kenya Nakamura, in October, and I understand she'll be back in action as soon as next year — she already returned to teaching a month after giving birth!).

But comparisons notwithstanding, Kwok says she never felt stressed about stepping into Uchida's shoes — she did so with numerous principal roles in the ballets SDT staged this year, in particular Kitri and Odette/Odile for this year's classical full-length ballets.

"Of course I want to do well, so yeah, I was really happy for the opportunities because the opportunities are really important to give me a chance to show what I can do, and just to push myself to see where I can get to."

And push herself she did — over this past year, she reveals she has surprised herself with what she's been able to accomplish and pull off: in particular she mentions "Theme and Variations", a George Balanchine piece renowned for its difficulty in terms of speedy, challenging movements.

"When I first joined the company, and Rosa (Park, one of the company principals at the time) was doing 'Theme and Variations', I was always watching it and going, OMG that's crazy, how?? How does she do it?? How do people do that?? ... and I did that this year, and it was fine!"

You can see a 1978 staging of it by the American Ballet Theatre featuring the legendary Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gelsey Kirkland here:

On her experience jumping into principal roles this year, she remarks on the human body, and how it can surprise a person with its endurance and tenacity to withstand great pressure and stress.

"Sometimes the human body is quite amazing, like you don't know until you do it. You don't know how hard you can push yourself if you never push yourself, so when you finally do it you're like, okay — this could work!"

And while a full-time professional dancer's "life span" is notoriously short in its prime years, Kwok plans to continue dancing for as long as her body will allow — up till now she has been quite successful in avoiding major injury (one of the things she does every night is something she calls "draining" her legs — lying on her back and elevating them until she feels numbness — in order to relieve the pressure and tension piled for hours on her legs and feet), so the hope is this will put her in good stead for the decades to come.

"It really depends on your body because the work we do is really tough on the body, so some people's careers can go longer... (but) now most go longer. So it really depends on every individual and how your body reacts to all these challenges or demands that you put on it every single day because it's hard too...

For me, I'll just see how it goes; as long as it can work for me I will use it. As long as it still wants to work, then we'll do it!"

Catch Kwok and the full SDT company of dancers in this teaser trailer ahead of their 2020 season of performance work:

Top photos by Lauren Choo