When Mei McArtor’s parents first enrolled her in dance class, they thought it might provide a creative conduit for their daughter’s irrepressible zeal for life. And they were right.
“I had a lot of energy as a kid, and I needed some physical outlet,” said Mei, a member of the Kansas City Ballet’s KCB II, “something to put my focus toward.”
She was only four when she entered Southeastern Ballet School in her hometown of Columbia, South Carolina, and she immediately took to the classes in “creative movement,” as the sessions for the youngest dancers were called.
It was the first step toward a lifelong love affair with dance.
When she temporarily stepped away from ballet the following year in order to focus on school, she began to miss it right away. “I remember asking my dad, ‘Can I go back to ballet?’ ” Even at that age she recognized within herself that drive toward “the specific physical activity and mental discipline that ballet offered,” she said. “I wanted it in my life.”
By now the McArtors “could tell this was something that I was really going to stick with,” Mei said. “And I did.”
Unlike many young dancers, who fall in love with ballet while experiencing a performance of Swan Lake or The Nutcracker, it was the ballet training itself that inspired Mei — “the artistry of the body and the mind,” she said, “that’s really what made me fall in love with ballet.”
Mei arrived in Kansas City in 2023 to join the Trainee Program of the Ballet’s Second Company, where she spent her first Kansas City year. Jumping from a humble school of dance directly into a major ballet company was both daunting and exhilarating. “It felt like the training wheels had been taken off,” she said.
Then in February 2024, as Mei’s first season was winding down, the Ballet’s artistic director, Devon Carney, called her in for a meeting. Mei panicked. “I was thinking of everything that I could have done wrong, every little mistake,” she said with a laugh. “The last thing on my mind was a promotion.”
And yet it was true: After just one season as a Trainee, she was being promoted to KCB II, the upper professional division of the Second Company, in which young dancers present performances, residencies, lecture demonstrations, and workshops throughout the Kansas City region.
Mei is the second of five daughters and the only adopted child in a Caucasian family. “My parents always knew they wanted to adopt,” she said. Not long after Emma, the McArtors’ oldest, was born, the family adopted 10-month-old Mei. After that came a set of twin girls, then a fifth daughter.
Just a year apart in age, Emma and Mei were very close growing up — even taking dance classes together.
For Mei, hers was just like any other normal American family. “Being the only Asian American in my family, I never felt like an outsider, or felt that they looked at me differently,” she said. “I always felt loved and welcomed.”
Because she was adopted so young, “my own knowledge of my heritage and culture was limited,” she said. Thus wen she studied Mandarin in school it was partly because she was interested in “learning more about where I came from, my cultural background.”
At 12, Mei enrolled in Boston Ballet’s summer intensive/ Newton Campus, and after just two days she was placed in the top class, where she trained with 16-and 17-year-olds. “I was pretty much the height I am now already,” she said. “My limbs were really long, and I wasn’t quite sure how to use them yet.”
But the Boston program proved critical to Mei’s future in dance. “It was a good moment in my life,” she said. “Coming back from that five-week intensive, I felt like I can really do this. I really wanted to put my all into it, to commit to this as a lifelong career.”
As high school drew to a close, Mei explored options, including admission to Indiana University — even though she felt that “academics and dancing in college wasn’t really something I wanted to do.”
She just wanted to dance, and she had grown serious about ballet at an early enough age that, by this time, a career in dance was already beginning to look plausible.
Moving 1,000 miles away from home at age 18 is not for the faint of heart, but her family now realized that “all the sacrifices they made — driving me to the ballet at odd hours, picking me up at night — were finally going somewhere,” Mei said.
Her parents “are now my biggest supporters. … They always tell me that as long as I’m doing something that I love, something that makes me happy, that’s all that matters.”
She also fell in love with Kansas City Ballet: its vitality, its support, its friendly and gifted dancers. She is thrilled to have taken part already in Val Caniparoli’s Jekyll & Hyde, Devon Carney’s The Nutcracker, Bruce Wells’ Beauty and the Beast, Gabriel Lorena’sUnder My Skin, and Balanchine’s Rubies.
Asians and Asian Americans are rapidly becoming more prominent members of ballet companies throughout the United States. Having long admired former Boston Ballet dancer Emily Entingh, an occasional guest teacher at Southeastern Ballet School, Mei is now fascinated with another dazzling Asian American artist: Kansas City Ballet’s Naomi Tanioka. “I’m just amazed by her, every time I see her dance,” Mei said.
“This is the dream,” she added. Wherever she lands in the world, she wants to “continue dancing for as long as I can. … Because honestly, I can’t imagine ever not doing it.”
— By Paul Horsley
To reach Paul Horsley, performing arts editor, send an email to paul@kcindependent.com or find him on Facebook (paul.horsley.501) or Twitter/Instagram (@phorsleycritic).
