[The National Ballet School of Canada] is a second tier performance [school], and even Baryshnikov, who defected from the Soviet Union to Canada in 1974 and was given asylum in Toronto, preferred to leave for the United States, joining the New York City Ballet and on to a prestigious career post-Soviet Union.

Currently, the ballet has a foreigner as a principal dancer, but this happens to be a Chinese-trained female dancer. I doubt that any American ballet company would want her. Imagine watching Swan Lake performed by a Chinese dancer? How are these young NBS dancers, guarded so strongly by these women as though they have brittle bones that could break at a glance, supposed to reconcile the story of Swan Lake with a Chinese face? How is that "protecting" young Canadian dancers?

I tried to find out about more about the Chinese dancer, Xiao Nan Yu. Whether she was married to a white Canadian as is becoming the norm here in Toronto, how she got into Canada in the first place, etc. Here is an excerpt of her biography from NBS website:

Born in Dalian, China, Xiao Nan Yu trained at the Shen Yang School of Dance, the Beijing Dance Academy in China and Canada’s National Ballet School. She joined The National Ballet of Canada in 1996 and has been a Principal Dancer since 2001.

Here are photos of her from the NBS site. Note her aggressive expression. And her official portrait at the NBS website shows a hard glint in her eyes, the triumphalist Asian behavior that I'm observing in Asians (here are my blogs on designers Wang and Doo-Ri). Here is Yu dancing the role of Odette in Swan Lake, an Asian face in a Western role.

I searched for her family background, since she has photographs of her with an Asian-looking daughter on her NBS profile. I was actually looking to see if she married a white Canadian once in Canada. But this website briefly mentions her marital situation:

Xiao Nan Yu, principal dancer with The National Ballet of Canada, and her husband Shuang are the proud parents of a baby girl named Ava, born in November.

The daughter is given the convenient English name of Ava (as in Gardner?!). Yu may not have her "Canadian" life, but she will make that easier for her daughter, including making it easier for her to nab that white Canadian husband.

[...]

Here's what the NBS informs us about one of the buildings, The Margaret McCain Academic Building:

8 academic classrooms; laboratories for computer, science and photography studies; art studio; audio-visual room; music room; ESL room; and study rooms.

Is the ESL (English as a Second Language) program for those potential Chinese dancers?

[...]

Finally, the head architect of the firm that designed the building ...is an Asian. A final knot that ties together Asian triumphalism with mediocrity, and the West's infatuation with all thing Asian.