Today, I had the opportunity to attend not one, but two presentations by Phil Chan where he discussed the future of the arts, more specifically in the ballet world, in terms of representing different cultures through movement, costumes, and appearances.
Phil Chan is the co-founder of Final Bow for Yellowface, a movement to make a change in how Asians are represented in ballet performances. For those that don’t know, yellowface is the use of makeup to create East Asian facial features for performance.
During his presentations, he did speak a bit of some Chinese history. He spoke about Genghis Khan who was a Chinese dictator. He had a military strategy of splitting up people and families of towns that he conquered to keep himself in power. This was a tactic of his to create a unified country by separating those that had any commonalities.
He also brought up Buddha and Pagod statues. The Buddha statues represent wealth and prosperity and are depicted with money and gold. The pagod statues are porcelain figures and statues that are similar to the Buddha statues. The only difference is that the pagod statues’ hands and heads bobble like bobbleheads when you touch them.
He mentioned how in ballet performances when portraying Chinese characters, the choreography tends to have similar bobbing and bowing movements as the statues. He also brought up how there tends to be a lot of shuffling in the dances because women used to bind their feet, and the only way that they could really move around was by shuffling. Mr. Chan also mentioned how they portrayed the characters with yellowface makeup, and they always used an object to try and represent the Chinese culture. Some examples are using umbrellas or fans and having the men have the Fu Manchu mustache and the characters’ hair be a queue.
Mr. Chan also talked a lot about orientalism and how they are portrayed more different in terms of people, places, and the plots of ballets. The oriental people would be shown to be more exotic and do crazy things that Westerners wouldn’t usually do such as kill themselves instead of being punished. The set designs of the ballets would always be grand and this sort of natural beauty, almost like a fantasy place. The plot of the ballets could have anything that was outside of the norms.
When talking about other ways we can portray Chinese characters without being racist, he brought up the importance of crickets in Chinese culture which I never knew about. Crickets are a symbol of good fortune and prosperity. If I remember correctly, Mr. Chan said that they kept crickets by the door, and if they stopped singing, it indicated that an intruder was coming.
The last thing that I want to bring up which I thought was really cool was he showed us little snippets of the National Ballet of China’s The Nutcracker performance on Youtube. It was really interesting because instead of going with the normal storyline of Christmas, they made the whole ballet fit into their culture and had the storyline be about Chinese New Year. The beginning would be a Chinese New Year party rather than a Christmas one. Instead of having the snow scene, I believe they were swans. Instead of having Russian, Spanish, Chinese, etc., they had sweets that were often left out or distributed around the time of Chinese New Year. Instead of having the Waltz of the Flowers, the tutus were made to look like Chinese porcelain. It was really cool to see the changes that they made to make the Nutcracker fit their culture.
It was overall really interesting to learn and talk about what we can do as the next generation of dancers to be more inclusive in the ballet world but to also learn to not appropriate or misrepresent other cultures and races. I think that our generation has a lot of work ahead of ourselves in terms of that. It was also really nice to learn more about some Chinese history and to take a look at some of the paintings and drawings he had in his slides.
Fantastic! Thank you for sharing this!