Hong Kong Meets World.

The Paris Opera Ballet School's Beatrice Martel will be among the guest teachers at this summer's Tenth Hong Kong International Summer Dance School. The 40-year-old Jean M. Wong School of Ballet, Hong Kong's largest ballet school, organizes the program.

The Ninth ISDS opened July 11 for a month-long session, and culminated in the gala performance "Stars of Tomorrow," in which most students took part.

Over 200 students aged eleven and up attended daily classes and rehearsals held in the school's new 10,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art headquarters and the Shatin Centre, one of the school's five centers in Hong Kong. Enrollment was higher this year than in previous years, due to changes in the course structure, according to ISDS coordinator Anna Chan. Students didn't have to attend back-to-back classes from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m, each day, but were allowed to select from a variety of classes, including classical ballet, jazz, folk dance, Chinese dance, modern, and tap.

This year's guest ballet teachers included Long Zhao, a Chinese principal dancer with the American Repertory Ballet, and South African teacher Yvonne Adkins, a former faculty member of London's Royal Ballet School. Each teacher choreographed a short work for the gala performance. Zhao, whose training was steeped in Balanchine technique, emphasized speed in his classes, while Adkins' classes stressed poise. When she corrected pirouettes, Adkins asked students to pull up the muscles of their upper bodies: "You must feel a sword running straight through your diaphram in the front to the back bone," she said.

Natalie Lipin, a 12-year-old American student with an elegant long line, praised Adkins' classes. "Yvonne is very strong in teaching you the way you stand, the way you do grands battements," she said. "She wants you to be straight in the center of the body. And she teaches you how to present yourself. She wants you to have a good centered position, and not to aim for the highest extension."

Adkins frequently sang when she counted the steps in an enchainement, and used another metaphor to teach her pupils to finish an enchainement with flourish. "Think of Pavarotti," she said. "He has so much charisma in his singing." On the last day of the course, Adkins advised her students not to neglect mathematics, because, as she put it, "You need to have a mathematical brain to dance."

There were 14 foreign students this year, from Indonesia, London, the U.S., and Taipei, and each was assigned a guardian in Hong Kong. They were selected based on their results at the Royal Academy of Dance exams, or from their audition videos. One of those scholarship students was Wong Yui, 12, from Shenzhen, whose piano teacher accompanied her to Hong Kong. They stayed at the Kowloon Hotel, a favorite with artists performing at the nearby Hong Kong Cultural. Yui began ballet training just two years ago. In Hong Kong, she also took classes in jazz and modern dance, and admitted she was too tired to go out much at night after classes.

As in previous years, a social etiquette class was held at five-star Grand Hyatt Hotel, and at the end of the course, outstanding students were awarded scholarships by guest teachers and the course administrators.