Whenever music came on, young Evangelyn Wong would find her body automatically grooving to the beat. If a tune was playing, one could always find a dancing Evangelyn in its vicinity.

Evangelyn loved movement from a young age.

When she was three years old, her mother took her to watch the beloved ballet The Nutcracker at the Kallang Theatre.

The booklet from the first ballet that Evangelyn’s mother took her to.

Evangelyn was so tiny then that she was given a booster seat so she could watch the ballet, but she eventually secured a better view of the ballerinas by sitting on a step along the aisle.

“What I saw opened my eyes to the possibility that being a ballerina was an actual job; that dancing was not just fun, it could be a career,” Evangelyn, now 27, told Salt&Light.

Fixated on becoming a ballerina, she pestered her mother to send her for ballet classes. She attended classes for a while before her mother withdrew her.

Young Evangelyn enjoying ballet as a preschooler.

At the time her mother was pregnant with her third child and could not afford to send Evangelyn to external classes as she was overwhelmed with family and financial issues.

Evangelyn’s mother had suspected that her husband was having an affair. Although he admitted to it and said he would end the affair, she would later find out that he did not. Despite the heartbreak, she decided to hold on to the marriage as she did not want her children to grow up without a father.

Amidst all these troubles, Evangelyn’s mother reasoned that it was sufficient for her daughter to join the ballet Co-Curricular Activity (CCA) offered by her primary school. There, Evangelyn’s talent was noticed by her CCA teacher, who had high hopes for her.

Later, when finances improved, Evangelyn’s mother acceded to her daughter’s request and enrolled her in external ballet classes.

“By then, it was too late. I couldn’t get the certificate that was required then in time to apply for SOTA’s (School of the Arts) dance faculty through Direct School Admission (DSA),” Evangelyn told Salt&Light. Ultimately, she did enter SOTA, but under the visual arts track.

Whenever she saw other students in dance class, her heart would soar and she would wish she could join them. However, she was not allowed to major in dance instead.

Driven by her deep passion for dance, Evangelyn continued taking ballet classes outside of school. Whenever her shoes or leotards were worn down and needed a change, she would go to Sonata Dancewear, the local company that offered her SOTA dance peers a discount on their dance attire.

Evangelyn at Sonata dancewear, the company that would come to play a big part in supporting her ballet journey later on.

“I admitted to the storeowners that I was not a dance major at SOTA, but they still kindly offered me the same discount because they appreciated my honesty. When they found out about my ballet dream, they encouraged me to audition for a local ballet scholars programme with the then-Singapore Dance Theatre (SDT),” Evangelyn related.

Evangelyn auditioned but was not accepted. Crestfallen, she began believing the voices in her head that told her that it was “too late” for her to pursue ballet professionally, and that she was “not good enough”.

However, she crossed paths with the owners of the dancewear company again a few months later. They had gone to the ballet school where she was taking lessons, to do pointe shoe fittings for the dancers in the school.

“When I met them again, I told them I did go for the audition but did not get in. They urged me to not give up and try  a second time,” she said.

Encouraged, Evangelyn auditioned a second time. This time, she was accepted into the scholars programme at SDT, now known as Singapore Ballet. She was 14 at the time.

“I believe God guided and provided for me a path in ballet through these divine appointments and opportunities despite my financial and family situation then,” said Evangelyn, who worships at Paya Lebar Methodist Church. As a teenager, she used to head the church’s dance ministry.

Ballet training days.

After training for two years with SDT, Evangelyn applied to study dance overseas and received a bursary to Scotland.

“There, I was the only foreign student outside of the European Union so I was charged the local rate for my studies. I was also awarded a sponsorship by Sonata, and they kindly shipped all the dancewear I needed overseas,” said Evangelyn, who, on hindsight, could clearly see and point out God’s fingerprints of provision in her journey.

Evangelyn dressed in dancewear from Sonata, the company that sponsored her during her overseas years of training.

Living in a foreign land all by herself at the age of 16 required Evangelyn to adjust quickly to a different culture and learn how to manage household chores by herself.

There were times during her three-year stay there that she was homesick but she found herself greatly supported by the local church.

“Whenever I had injuries from dance training, my church mates volunteered to drive me to church for services. When I had no family members to invite to watch my dance performances, the church members came to watch them,” she related.

Evangelyn performing with an overseas company.

Evangelyn (the one being lifted) taking part in a performance while she was studying overseas.

Evangelyn flourished in Scotland, both in her dance training and performing ballet tours. Having scored a distinction in her final examination with the Royal Academy of Dance, she qualified to compete in the Genée International Ballet Competition as a semi-finalist in 2016 and 2017. Now known as the Margot Fonteyn International Ballet Competition, this competition is one of the oldest and most prestigious in the world.

Evangelyn performing at the Genee International Ballet competition in 2016 that was held in Sydney.

“It was my childhood dream come true,” Evangelyn told Salt&Light. “When I was young, I read about another Singaporean taking part in the Genee competition in the newspapers and it seemed impossible for me. But God knew about my dream and made it happen.”

Evangelyn performing at the Genee International Ballet competition in 2016.

Yet after graduating with First Class Honours in dance from the Northumbria University, Evangelyn did not look for overseas opportunities to advance in a professional ballet career.

Evangelyn graduated with first class honours in dance from the University of Northumbria.

“Unlike my peers who were chasing overseas opportunities, I felt a strong prompting to come back to Singapore. On hindsight, I realised it was from God rather than a sense of homesickness,” she said.

In 2017, Evangelyn came back to Singapore and continued training with SDT. Her goal was to become a professional dancer with the company but she had to bide her time as such vacancies were very limited.

Provision among the leaves

While she trained and waited for her chance, Evangelyn taught dance on the side to fund her daily and training expenses.

“Teaching dance was the last thing I wanted to do when I finished dance school,” she admitted to Salt&Light. “It took precious time away from my own training and I resented the fact that the children – some of whom didn’t even want to be there – had opportunities that I did not have when I was younger. But I did it for the money.”

Money was so tight at the time that she had only S$500 in her bank account. One time, she needed S$200 for some physiotherapy sessions but could not afford to let her bank balance drop further lest the bank charged her a monthly fee for not maintaining the minimum sum of $500 in the account.

“One Sunday, I began complaining to God about how difficult my life was. I needed physiotherapy sessions to get my body in the right state for training but I couldn’t make ends meet,” said Evangelyn, who also had to skip church service that day because she was working.

That day after work, she took a different route home. Instead of walking through the carpark to get to the bus stop, she decided to walk along a pavement that was shaded. It was a windy day and leaves were scattered all over the orange-coloured pavement.

At that moment, she heard the Holy Spirit say to her: “Pick it up.”

Puzzled, she whined internally to God.

“As if my life is not hard enough, now You want me to pick up trash from the floor? My body is in pain and I want to go home,” she told Him.

As she walked further, she heard the Holy Spirit say again: “Go back and pick it up.”

Evangelyn ignored the Voice. She had by then walked some distance away and did not want to turn back.

But she heard the Voice a third time.

“Go and pick it up,” it said. It was no longer an invitation but a stern command.

Fearing God, she walked back reluctantly to the pavement and rummaged through the scattered leaves.

Camouflaged against the pavement was a neatly folded orange piece of paper. She unfolded it to find that it was a S$100 bill and nestled within the folds were two S$50 notes.

“The amount of S$200 was exactly what I needed for physio. I was stricken with guilt that God had mercy on this ungrateful daughter of His,” Evangelyn said.

When she needed more money for physiotherapy again a year later, she remembered her previous experience and tried praying to God to let her “find” more money on the floor. However, she went away disappointed when she did not discover any.

She went for her physiotherapy session anyway, only to hear her therapist telling her at the end of it that she did not need to pay for that session.

“It’s covered,” Evangelyn recalled the words of her therapist to her. That day, she learnt that God provides for His children in different ways.

It was only in New York when she was with the American Ballet Theatre that Evangelyn’s eyes were opened to the power of teaching.

In June 2019, Evangelyn auditioned for and was accepted into the American Ballet Theatre’s summer intensive programme in New York. During her time there, she met a teacher who believed deeply in all her students.

“Instead of making her students feel that they are not good enough, she believed that all of us had the potential to make it professionally. Meeting her ignited the spark in me for teaching,” said Evangelyn.

Evangelyn’s mother flew all the way to New York to catch her daughter’s performance there.

When she returned from New York, the standard of her dance had improved tremendously. SDT finally offered her the opportunity to train and perform with its company dancers under a full scholarship, though she was not yet considered a full-fledged company dancer.  

“Life was hectic but I thought I was finally pursuing my dream of becoming a ballerina,” Evangelyn said. She would  train and perform during the week, and teach dance on the weekends.

Evangelyn taught ballet to children as a side hustle.

Pivoting during COVID 

Just a few months later, however, the COVID-19 pandemic took over the world.

Ballet performances were halted. Evangelyn was also faced with reduced teaching hours when the Circuit Breaker rules were put in place.

With income dropping drastically, she had to consider other job options.

She began encouraging herself by turning Scripture verses into stickers. These were so popular she started selling them online.

Then her father, who runs an insurance agency, urged her to consider joining him in his firm.

“By the time he asked me to help him, and I had forgiven him for his infidelity. He wanted to raise me up as a leader in his firm. I said yes, because I needed to supplement my teaching income and it helped that the job was quite flexible,” she explained to Salt&Light.

She secured her insurance licence and began juggling multiple responsibilities: Dance training and teaching, being an insurance agent and running her online sticker shop.

Though she was a newbie as an agent, God sent clients and recruits to her.

“My primary school friends from a long time ago started contacting me and others would find me whenever money ran low. I had no time to cold call or run roadshows, but I never needed to,” Evangelyn remembered.

Over time, she formed and led her own team and tried to practise “servant leadership”.

“If a project was not yet completed, I would let my agents go and eat or sleep first and I would finish it,” she said.

The agency was filled with believers from the faith. Evangelyn saw it as a “mission field”; she shared the Gospel with fellow agents and invited those who wanted to know more about her faith to church.

However, a distracted and tired Evangelyn hurt her ankle during one ballet training session.

Evangelyn sustained various ankle injuries during her dance training even while running around as an insurance agent.

When her ankle recovered, she doubled down on her training.

“I wanted to prove myself and become a company dancer. Ballet had become an idol of sorts to me and I was more afraid of what my director thought of me than what was healthy for me or what pleased God,” admitted Evangelyn, adding that she started experiencing panic attacks during this season.

Dance became everything to her.

“I gave up social activities and did not prioritise friends’ birthdays. Church and fellowship also took a backseat,” she added.

Her unhealthy fear of not wanting to be seen as an injured, and by extension, less competent dancer, even led her to mask her injuries.

“Once, I was given medical leave by the doctor because of an ankle injury but I let the school think that I was sick instead in order not to jeopardise any promotion or my reputational standing,” Evangelyn confessed.

Her ankle eventually recovered but she continued to be stretched thin rushing from one thing to another all day, whether for her insurance clients or teaching jobs or for dance training.

In 2021, Evangelyn sustained a second injury. The MRI scan showed that both her ankles were overworked. The specialist advised her to stop dancing and to monitor the situation.

The death of a dream that she slogged for

“The recovery period was tough. I was trying to find peace with my decision to walk away from my dream of becoming a ballerina,” Evangelyn told Salt&Light.

“Deep down, I knew that God was pulling me away from it because my gift and talent had become my idol.”

She stopped her own dance training but continued teaching children – variously from her private classes and from the dance school where she worked.

In 2022, Evangelyn fell when someone bumped into her in a crowded MRT underpass. An MRI scan revealed a hole in her cartilage, specifically, a stage 2A osteochondral lesion in her ankle bone. Multiple specialists advised her to go for surgery.

The MRI scan that identified the tear in her cartilage.

To make matters worse, the dance school she taught at abruptly closed down in December that year.

In 2023, Evangelyn went for surgery. Stem cells were taken from her bone marrow and injected into her ankle. She could not walk for three months and had to use a wheelchair.

“I was depressed and had insomnia. As I grieved the loss of my dream of being a dancer, my heart hardened towards God. I could not understand why He was taking away something that meant so much to me. I stopped praying or reading the Bible. I still went to church but could not bring myself to sing praises to Him,” she told Salt&Light.

Evangelyn’s mobility was badly affected after the surgery.

One night, she lay in bed, feeling jaded after taking morphine to numb the pain that was shooting up her legs.

It was then that she heard God speak to her.

“If I take away the very thing that you love, do you still love Me and would you trust that the plans I have for you is good?” He asked her.

Evangelyn struggled to answer, and questioned herself whether she really loved God or if she loved what He could give her more.

Her heart began to open up to God when she decided to surrender herself to Him.

“Yes, Lord, I do love you and I choose to trust You,” she replied.

As her ankle recovered, she continued with her insurance job. However, she also felt accountable to her remaining students. She began hunting for a new space to teach ballet and, deep down, to continue dancing.

The final nail in the coffin

Barely a year later, in 2024, her life was turned upside down again.

One day, her mother heard the Holy Spirit’s prompting to check her husband’s phone. She successfully unlocked it and played a voice message that had just come in. She heard a child’s voice asking her husband when he would be coming home.

Evangelyn recalled: “To my mother’s horror, she discovered that my father had had yet another affair. He had not only been having a longstanding affair with a colleague in his insurance firm, but he had been living a double life, raising a second family the last few years.

“God had shielded our family by revealing it only at the right time,” she reflected. “By this time, my siblings and I were all grown up and working, and could manage the news better. It would have been far more disastrous had we found out about it earlier.”

Nonetheless, she harboured anger towards her father. This devastating news not only affected their personal relationship, but her career at the insurance firm as well.

“I felt he did not appreciate how much pain he had caused us nor the forgiveness which we had extended to him in the past,” she said.

“It was the nail in the coffin for me. By then, I had lost my ballet dream, my teaching job, my physical function and independence, my family unit and an insurance career which I had built up over time.”

To quit or not to quit 

As her parents navigated divorce, Evangelyn had to decide what to do at work.

One thing was clear; she felt she could no longer stay and submit to her father’s authority given his moral compromise.

Yet she was stuck between a rock and a hard place.

She and her team could choose to transfer to another agency within the same company, but that required the approval of her boss – her father. He was unlikely to grant it. Alternatively, she could leave the company for another, which meant abandoning the team and the work that she had built up over the years. Also, there would no longer be a steady income stream from her current clients’ policy renewals as she would have to start from scratch if she moved to another company.  

“Everyone who knew about it in the industry advised me to fight this injustice, and raise the matter to the management. They questioned why I had to pay the price for my father’s mistake and insisted that I should keep what was rightfully mine,” Evangelyn related.

Deep down, she knew that staying would further affect her physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

Troubled, she met up with her mentor, a veteran in the industry. Her mentor encouraged her surrender the matter to God, let go of her insurance job, and let Him take over, contrary to the other advice she had been receiving.

Evangelyn saw wisdom in her advice, but she still had some reservations.

“Without a steady income from my insurance job, I didn’t know if I could survive. I only had a few dance students and my online sticker shop,” she recalled.

The next morning, Evangelyn found herself reading about Absalom (2 Samuel 13-19) during her quiet time. Driven by a desire for vengeance, Absalom took matters into his own hands. He killed his half-brother and tried to usurp his father David’s throne, but his actions only led to his own death.

“Do not be like Absalom. Do not walk in his path,” Evangelyn heard God’s still small voice saying to her.

“The consequence does not need to come from you; it only results in death. Vengeance belongs to Me,” He added

It was then that Evangelyn felt “100% at peace” about resigning from her job. She left the company in 2025 after closing matters with her clients and fellow agents.

During this difficult period, she learnt to open up and receive help not only from her Pastors, but also from her cell cluster and cell group in church.

Evangelyn’s cell group having a Christmas party in her dance studio.

“I realised that they wanted to support me and that I wasn’t disturbing them with my troubles. They asked me out for meals and journeyed with me,” she said.

With the divorce proceedings between her parents underway, not only did her family have to find a new home but that her search for a studio space was now more urgent than ever. She used to train her students in her old home, which was spacious as it was an executive apartment.

Her old studio in her executive apartment flat.

Evangelyn was so desperate for a studio space that she was willing to settle for less optimal spaces that were sloping or had pillars or pipes poking out of nowhere.

“But God was looking out for me. Every time I was about to sign the lease for a unit that wasn’t ideal, it would be snapped up by someone else,” she recounted.

Desperate, she went down on her knees one day and asked God for a unit, as her students had upcoming examinations and competitions that she needed to prepare them for.

Later that same day, she found a space that fit her budget newly advertised on an online property portal. She viewed it the next day and booked the unit the following day.

It was already furnished and needed minimal renovations, and Evangelyn took over the unit on her 26th birthday in 2024.

Developing the next generation of dancers

Today, the number of students at her studio – Evangels Dance at Upper Paya Lebar Road – has grown fivefold.

Evangelyn shaping the next generation at Evangels Studio. Photo credit: Sonata Dancewear.

Her faith-based dance studio aims to provide a holistic education and safe space for the children to explore their interests and pursue their passion in dance.

“We don’t follow trends. Many popular culture shows and songs today have their associations with the occult and so we avoid playing them during our lessons,” said Evangelyn.

“The students must also feel safe to tell me when they are injured and need time to rest without feeling that they might be overlooked for certain opportunities. We assess them more for their attitude than their talent, and believe all of them can have a shot at competitions that are matched to their skill levels,” she added.

Preparing her students for dance competitions and celebrating their wins with them.

Such a philosophy stems from her own journey with the Lord.

“He stripped away every achievement and everything that I held dear in my life,” said Evangelyn. “It is so that I can ask, who am I if I am not a dancer, a dance teacher, an insurance agent or a daughter in a happy family? The unravelling was to reveal to me that I am a child of God, and that He loves us without us needing to achieve or prove anything.”

She hopes to be a safe space to the children with whom they can freely confide in without fear of repercussions. Photo credit: Sonata Dancewear.

While Evangelyn used to feel a tinge of sadness whenever she sees other dancers pursing professional careers, she has come to appreciate that He has called her to a higher calling.

She told Salt&Light: “I was meant to be more than just dancing for myself. Music and movement are created for worship of the Most High and I get to share and impart that beauty with the next generation of dancers.”  

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