Courage

In the hours before I launched my “Memoirs of a Chinese Dancer” blog, I had a mini anxiety attack.  Stepping away from my laptop to clear my head, chopsticks in hand over a plate of dinner, I asked myself (yet again) whether I was crazy enough to lay bare the emotional wounds of my journey into the professional dance world.  There’s an embarrassing vulnerability in showing weakness — in proclaiming to the world that yes, I too, have failed before, and I too, have triumphed through tears.  The most horrifying “what if” scenarios swirled in my head, while their alter egos reminded me of the joy of being able to touch even one person.

Then, for some odd reason, I got the random urge to look up the definition of courage.

courage (noun): the ability to do something that frightens one

Ahh…  It all made sense then and there.  No wonder I was scared.  I was a mouse click away from a (tiny) courageous act.

You know, it’s strange…  In everyday life, I’m the most cautious person I know.  I’ll read and re-read everything (even a simple e-mail or Instagram post) over and over again before clicking the send button.  You can only imagine how this goes when there’s more at stake, like a grant application — which, since I write a lot of grants these days (duh, I’m an artist!), happens pretty often.

But when it comes to matters of the heart, I’m uncharacteristically bold.  Don’t get me wrong — I’ll still read and re-read things over an absurd amount of times first.  But after that, I’ll do things that people will look at me later like, “How are you so brave?  I couldn’t do that.”  Like moving across the country to go to Stanford, where I knew basically no one and figured I’d probably be the dumbest one there.  Or quitting a prestigious, high-paying economic consulting job to pursue a professional dance career in the unforgiving city that is New York.  Or laying bare my soul for the world to read (and judge).

It was with this uncharacteristic boldness that I advocated for the finale of Atlanta Chinese Dance Company’s most recent production that initially left many silently (or not so silently) like WTF?!?!?!  You can read more about said finale in my previous essay “Why Atlanta Chinese Dance Company’s Finale Won’t Have Fans or Ribbons.” Long story short, I knew it’d either be groundbreaking for the company or equally likely, a huge flop.  And the thing is…  For our historically risk adverse company of twenty-five years, “huge flop” was an unknown quantity.  (Ahem, no pressure or anything!)

The first time I worked up the courage to share the YouTube link of the original cast performance with a long-time student, she said it was “different.”  “Different” sounded about right — unlike our visually stunning finales of the past with extravagant traditional costumes and a kaleidoscope of fans and ribbons galore, this one was raw, earthy, and frankly, downright ugly.  The dancers were dressed in tattered clothing of destitute migrant workers, and the closest thing to a fan or ribbon was their checkered vinyl bags (or in the future words of a roommate of another student, “the ugliest bag I’ve ever seen in my life”).

Her mother was more blunt.  She was concerned that it wasn’t flashy enough and that we didn’t have enough actors in our company to pull it off — concerns Artistic Director Hwee-Eng Y. Lee (or Ms. Lee) and I had mulled over countless times ourselves.  We’d been trying for years just to coax a perfunctory smile out of our dancers, and now we expected them to convey the wide-eyed excitement and heartbreaking despair of Chinese migrant workers fighting for a job in the big city?  Clearly, this was going to be a walk in the park.  And that’s before we even got to the singing part.  Yes, singing.  In Chinese.  Half of our cast doesn’t even speak Chinese, and we’re a dance company — we’d never tried to sing on stage before.  Yeah…  And the last time we tried shouting single words as a part of a dance, many of our dancers straight-up refused.

Another student was more enthusiastic.  She actually loved the piece.  But when I asked her what she thought it meant, she asked if the checkered vinyl bags were pillows.  Someone else thought they were hiking in the woods.  (No joke.)  Therein was yet another challenge — making people “get” the piece.  A close friend of mine was in the audience when the piece was premiered by Northeast Normal University for the prestigious Tao Li Bei Dance Competition in China — according to her, the entire audience was in tears.  But that was China, where many in the audience were quite possibly the left-behind children of migrant workers (left-behind in the countryside in the care of grandparents while their parents looked for work in faraway cities).  They certainly didn’t need to be told what checkered vinyl bags were when it was what their parents hauled along before boarding a train without them.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, I’m a very stubborn person.  So I looked at all of the obstacles above and was like, “Yeah, let’s do this!”  Even though it scared Ms. Lee and me half to death.  The entire time.

Some might call it courage.  But a more appropriate word might be masochism, because surprise, surprise…  It wasn’t a walk in the park.  We knew this going into it, of course, and we chose to proceed anyway.

The first time we performed the piece as a preview, I overheard one of the dancers in the dressing room afterwards “I hope we never do this piece again!”  When I said, “So, I take it you don’t like it?”  Another was like, “Uhh…yeah.  Come on, guys.  Back me up!”  There was awkward silence.  No one else came forward to say they didn’t like the piece (not with me in the room, at least!), but it wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement.

As expected, the audience reaction was mixed.  At least they were clearly engaged — from the stage I’d heard laughter and raucous applause — but the singing at the end had people like “Huh?”  We asked anyone who was willing to share what they thought of the piece.  One liked the “Flight of the Bumblebee” music (yep, techno “Flight of the Bumblebee” for Chinese dance!) — so much so that he asked for the audio track to listen to at home.  Another applauded the company for taking on social issues and not just serving eye candy.  But others said they didn’t get it, that it wasn’t their cup of tea.  Still others criticized the uneven acting caliber of the cast.

They were right.  The acting left a lot to be desired, my own performance included.  And despite introducing the piece with a short explanation and even preceding it with what we thought was a heart-wrenching piece about the migrant workers’ left-behind children in the countryside, it still wasn’t enough to effectively communicate the message we intended — at least not for non-Chinese speakers who couldn’t understand the lyrics-heavy audio.

Then it hit me one day after rehearsal.  I’ve never been good at speaking in front of crowds (the “crowd” of my classroom included), but I’m a decent writer.  So I poured my heart out onto my laptop — what drew me to the piece, how it intersected with my own life here in America, what I hoped people would get out of it — and shared the essay with the cast.  I don’t know that it changed the minds of everyone (or if some ever got around to reading it), but I can say that it was a turning point for at least a few.  One would tell me that though she was initially skeptical about the piece, reading my essay made her feel like what we were saying mattered and that the piece eventually became one of her favorites.  Another said she could barely get through the piece without crying, because it reminded her of the sacrifices her parents have made for her.

If Ms. Lee and I had chosen a more conventional, flashy finale, I wouldn’t have had to take the time to write an essay that cost me many hours and even more heartache.  But then my students wouldn’t have surprised me by not only NOT refusing to sing in Chinese as we had feared, but digging deep inside of themselves to make their performance say something that mattered to them — in a way that I had never witnessed from them before.  I’m such a proud teacher!

There was another game changer.  Ms. Lee and I knew we needed something to pull the audience into the story, so we had been working on an intro piece featuring a migrant worker mother (me) and her left-behind child with her grandfather in the countryside — it just wasn’t quite ready for our preview performance.  The execution of the piece was a collaborative effort between Ms. Lee, myself, and the other two dancers.  The concept “Dreaming on the Train” was something I closed my eyes and dreamt up in my head.  It was the first time I truly came up with a piece from scratch instead of just borrowing elements here and there and repackaging it as “new.”  Even the accompanying video from the countryside to the city was taken on my iPhone during my summer trip in China.  Every time I closed my eyes and imagined the choreography unfolding in my head, it brought me to tears — but I had no idea if it would read that way to anyone else.  I just had to cross my fingers and hope for the best.

I won’t bore you with any more details about the process (hah, I probably already have!), but the bottom line is that there were many, many days filled with unexpected challenges and intense doubt.  Even two weeks before opening night, as I was putting the finishing touches on the slide projections that would help frame the production and provide translation for the non-Chinese speakers in the audience, I was still asking myself if I was on a kamikaze mission.

What if the curtain goes down and the audience is like … … … ???  Anyway, it was too late to turn back.

So…

The curtain went down on opening night and amazingly, no one threw tomatoes at the stage.  What a relief!  #jk  In all seriousness, the audience was extremely enthusiastic — even more so than for our flashy finale of 2015.  As I ventured into the lobby after the show, I wasn’t sure if the standing ovation was because of — or in spite of — our finale.  After all, we had 17 other traditional pieces.  But as I struck up conversations with friends and friends of friends and combed through audience surveys, I began to understand the weight of what we had accomplished together.

At the core of it was this comment: “We will not be the same, but better people.  True art!”

After the show Ms. Lee and I went to dinner with my dad (who is a professor at Georgia Tech) and a group of his students from China.  These young male engineering nerds, on the cusp of parenthood, proceeded to have a heated discussion about how they should raise their children — whether they too, like the migrant workers in our production, would leave their children behind to make more money elsewhere to bring back to their families.  Some were left-behind children themselves, and the production made them open up to each other about how it affected them growing up.  To sit back and appreciate that our performance was a conversation starter not about dance or culture, but how to live life…  That just made me smile so big inside!

Importantly, our production didn’t just resonate with Chinese audiences.  The comment I cherish most actually came from an older white man who lives in Ohio:

“Hi Kerry…..I am the grandfather of one of your baby pandas [ACDC’s youngest dancers].  We were honored to be able to come see the production in Atlanta over the weekend and although [our granddaughter] was a star in our eyes, your production, primarily the last 2 acts with you performing as the mother leaving her child with her grandfather was just amazing.  I know that in music or in any form of art, you strive to tell a story that resonates with your audience.  Your performance brought not only me, but those around where I was sitting to tears.  The emotion that you showed in your facial expression as well as dance movements made the audience feel your hope, your fear, your pain and your love for the child left behind.  To be able to do that is more than art, it is a talent.  To be able to move an audience and bring them to tears is stunning.  I think that your ability through dance and your facial expressions allowed each person to go on their special journey, but it also allowed them to do an internal audit to make sure that they were heading the right way in a world of chaos, like the one that exists today.  For me personally, it brought me to a time when I first heard that my daughter was going to adopt [our granddaughter].  To have a love so deep that it would cause you to travel half way around the world to share that love with a child, is something I can’t put into words, but your performance did.  Thanks for a powerful performance.  It was an honor to witness.”

When I read that, I just about died and went to heaven.  Because it was exactly what I had hoped — or actually, more than I knew to hope — that we’d accomplish with this finale.

Was it all “happily ever after”?  Of course not.  After all this, there were still people who said it wasn’t their cup of tea.  Alas, art is subjective — you can’t please everyone all the time.  And if you do, maybe you should ask yourself if you’re playing it too safe.  If I had to grade our performance, I’d still say that our acting could have been much stronger — I know I was still questioning some of my own choices when I finally saw the close up video, and there are quirks unique to the Chinese working class that we didn’t quite capture.  Dance wise, it could have been cleaner and more technically solid (e.g. I…umm…shouldn’t have fallen off my partner’s back and toppled onto the ground mid-performance).  And our singing?  Forget about it!  Haha.  Don’t worry, we’ll stick to dancing.  😉

But at the end of the day, I’ve grown.  Our dancers have grown.  And our company has grown.  We’ve taken a leap from educating about culture to exploring our shared humanity through culture.

None of that would have been possible without a little bit of courage and a whole lot of fear.

So…  The next time you’re feeling a little scared, you just might be on the cusp of a personal breakthrough.  Without fear, there is no courage.  By definition.  So be a masochist.  Choose the scarier path.  Trap yourself into reaching the point of no return.  And then take a look back — and be prepared to be amazed.

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Wanna watch the video?  Here you go!

Part 1 – Dreaming on the Train
Part 2 – Paper Airplane Letters
Part 3 – Migrant Workers Go to the City

And here is a photo gallery of the entire production, traditional pieces and all.

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PS To those of you who went on this journey with me — dancers, volunteers, supporters, fans, and especially Ms. Lee…  I know this didn’t just take courage on my part.  It couldn’t have happened without an open mind, lots of sweat, and yes — courage — from all of you.  Thanks so much for enduring this tumultuous process with me!

Curtain Call Photo by Christine Zahniser