Dance people in China are curious about dance in the West—and it goes both ways. In June, I was a guest engaged in two genres—ballet and modern dance—in two cities—Shanghai and Beijing. I participated in dialogues, gave lectures, directed workshops, and observed classes and rehearsals. I became curious about two dance forms that are largely absent in the United States: Chinese classical dance and dance drama. And a bonus: I saw a very exciting young choreographer. I learned a lot about China through dance—and through the quietly wheeling, arcing traffic at large intersections.Children dancing course in Shanghai
Here is how this double-duty exchange happened. Yuan Yuan Tan, the great Chinese ballerina of San Francisco Ballet, invited me to speak in the forum sponsored by her Tan Yuanyuan Studio. Around the same time, I was re-invited to speak on post-modern dance by Professor Qing-Yi Liu at Shanghai Theatre Academy and Wang Xin at Beijing Dance Academy. The latter two invitations came through Lan-Lan Wang, the tireless Chinese-American dancer/teacher/producer who has organized many China-U.S. exchanges. (In 2017, Lan-Lan had arranged for two of my articles on Trisha Brown to be translated and published in Chinese dance journals.) So this trip expanded into a week in Shanghai and a week in Beijing.
During the first evening, I realized what a charismatic speaker YY
is. She was in her element—lively, fun, and spontaneous—talking about
the challenges of The Little Mermaid. This ballet, based on a Hans
Christian Andersen tale and defined by Neumeier as a dance drama, was a
turning point for her. It challenged her to dig into herself and find
the acting skills to portray the Mermaid. Her recent partner in that
ballet is Aaron Robison, the charming British dancer who recently joined
SFB. In between film clips of the ballet, YY and Aaron demonstrated the
tricky lifts while the Mermaid is swishing her blue satin-y tail—which
YY had brought all the way from San Francisco.
They described the
injuries they incurred—to knees, to rib cage—while working on the
ballet. In the film clips you could see how YY used her face to express
the Mermaid’s yearning and despair, and let her legs collapse under her
to show the pain of learning to locomote on land. She said she had to
allow herself to be “ugly,” which to me means letting go of ballet
aesthetics to portray an extreme state of feeling. Even on film, her
portrayal cut to the heart. As Steven Winn wrote in SF Chronicle, “The
masterpiece here is the Little Mermaid herself, brought to
heartbreakingly vivid life by Yuan Yuan Tan on opening night. In an
absolutely astonishing, emotionally fearless performance, Tan leaves
everything on the stage . . . Tan is utterly committed to the emotional
truth of the moment.”The second event was a dialogue between YY and me
about contemporary ballet choreographers. I had chosen four who had
worked closely with YY: Christopher Wheeldon, Alexei Ratmansky, William
Forsythe and Wayne McGregor. I showed some images, described their
styles briefly, and asked YY to talk about working with them. Having
been a muse for some of these choreographers, she gave us insights about
their work. (Sorry, I can’t tell you what she said because, well, she
was speaking Chinese. My interpreter was whispering in my ear, but I
didn’t catch all of it.)
The final event of this forum was a “roundtable,” though we were rushed for time so the table never rounded into a discussion. As the first speaker, I was asked to describe trends that I see in dance today. I chose three that I thought might be transferable: dancing in museums, excavating dance history, and cultural hybrids. One of the following speakers, producer Frank Fu, emphasized the necessity to target new audiences. In response to my talk, he joked that dance in museums is just “making noise or rolling around on the floor.” This ticked me off, so I decided to include more slides of dance in museums in the next leg of my journey (after YY’s forum), which was a lecture on “Judson Dance Theater and Post-Modern Dance.” It so happened that, a few days earlier, the NYC–based Chinese choreographer Yin Mei had premiered a site-specific work to celebrate the new Modern Industrial Museum in Wuhan, Hubei Province. This was a big deal because the museum was designed by world-famous architect Daniel Libeskind. Yin Mei had sent me pictures on WeChat and told me it was live-streamed and viewed by 340,000 people. I hope someone tells Mr. Fu about it!
We also visited Shanghai Dance School, YY’s old training ground, now part of the Shanghai International Dance Center. They have reason to be proud of their illustrious alumna: YY is the first Chinese ballerina to become an international superstar and has been deemed a national hero. On the wall is a life-size picture of her younger self in a white tutu.
We saw a rehearsal of a garland waltz with lovely, proud 13-year-old girls and boys. But it was the modern dance class taught by Kong Lin Lin that grabbed me. She had 14-year-olds yanking their legs up, throwing themselves off-balance, twisting and turning, ducking under each other—all at the barre even before coming center. At first I was alarmed by the yanking, preferring leg lifts to be somatically supported. But then I was taken by the sheer ingenuity of the steps and the girl-on-girl partnering. The students charged across the floor and threw themselves into very physical pulling and sharing weight, like an aggressive, brisk version of contact improvisation. (Btw, I later saw a workshop given by Beijing CI [Contact Improvisation] for non-dancers of all ages, including three children.)
