Mayuko Shoka was born and raised in Gifu, Japan, where she started ballet training at Ballet studio K&M at age of 7 under Kazuko and Zlatko Mikulic. The main ballet style practiced was the Vaganova. At the age of 17, she moved to England to attend The Arts Educational School. Here she mostly practiced RAD ballet method and Cecchetti ballet technique and she got a Cecchetti teaching certificate. She also had exposure to tap, jazz, contemporary and modern dance forms while she was there. After a year, she moved to New York to continue her training at Joffrey Ballet School.At the age of 20, she was accepted to Dance Theatre of Harlem Ensemble under the director Arthur Mitchell, where she performed many principal roles in such as Joplin Dancers, New Bach, Concerto In F, South African Suite, Le Corsair, Nutcracker, and Glinka, among others. While she was there, she toured all over the United States and overseas such as Bahamas and Jamaica. After moving to Seattle she became certified Yoga teacher by CorePower Yoga. While there, she taught Ballet and Yoga at Vam Studios School of Dance and took tap classes from Mark Mendonca to deepen the tap education. She recently moved to LA and she is very excited to join TakeLessons to share her passion for ballet and all of the knowledge she learned in her career. I believe that I am good at teaching young children, teenagers and also adults. When I was dancing professionally I was so focused on the techniques that I forgot how fun is and how much I loved dancing. Then after my career, I was able to approach dance from a more relaxed and fun-driven perspective and it made me realize that everybody should be having fun dancing, especially if not dancing professionally. Also, when I started dancing as a kid, I didn’t have “the ballerina body” (e.g. not flexible enough, closed hips, no adequate feet) so ballet did not come natural for me. I always had to work so much harder than the other girls in the studio to achieve the same results. Thanks to my hard work, the shape of my legs changed completely after many years. This struggle, to get a better dancer, taught me how hard ballet could be and made me understand more about the details of techniques and the steps necessary to perfectionate them. I am happy to share all the knowledge accumulated over the years to allow my students to improve their skills while still having fun.