There was a huge interview and article in the Weekend Standard last week on Willy Tsao and the 广东现代舞团 Guangdong Modern Dance Company. When I was last in Guangzhou there were rumours about the company, orchestra, and Xinghai Concert Hall linking together, which has now happened. The interview talks about this, the state of modern dance in China, and the implications of this pretty big deal for the lives of the dancers and the art scene in Guangzhou.
Now his Guangdong dance company is creating history again. It became part of a unit comprising the Xinghai Concert Hall and the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra to be privatized by the government, on direct order from the State Council.
Tsao holds 40 percent of the dance company’s shares, while the provincial government owns the rest. But more than half of the funds still come from his pocket. “The market is what we create. Now we have a brand – the creative beauty of modern dance. That’s what we sell.”
To keep his troupe afloat, Tsao has to choreograph advertising shows for shampoo, credit cards or real estate. But he insists such commercialism doesn’t affect the purity of his art because it is still about creativity.
Perhaps the most reliable source of income comes from overseas, where his dancers earn hundreds of thousands of yuan per tour. He’s taking GMDC to Poland and Denmark this week and all three dance companies to the US and Canada in October.
With salaries of just 2,000 yuan (HK$1,900) a month, Tsao’s dancers must perform in clubs or events to make ends meet. Even Tsao confesses he’s so busy running the dance companies that he can only choreograph a new show every two years.
But he is optimistic. “The day modern dance came to China, we started to liberate our bodies. Our Renaissance has started, because the Renaissance in the West was about liberation of the body.”
Save the last dance for Tsao
Rose Tang
It’s a muggy midsummer night in Guangzhou, the air still and smelling of car exhaust. At a dusty intersection stands an Arc de Triomphe dedicated to Kuomintang soldiers who fought the Japanese during World War II.
Around the corner is the quiet campus of the Guangdong Dance School, the epicenter of a revolution not only in the Chinese approach to dance but, in many ways, Chinese culture as well.
The revolution is led by perhaps the least trendy and the oldest among the ponytailed men, strapless young women and camera-clad photographers streaming into the small theater. He is Willy Tsao.
Dressed in a T-shirt, khaki shorts, and plastic sandals with socks, the humble 50-year-old Hong Kong native looks like nothing more than one of millions of average mainland men.
“Please turn off your mobile phones. The slightest sounds would disturb the dancers,” Tsao explains in Putonghua to the audience, like a kindergarten teacher. “Sorry about the photographers at this premiere. For your compensation, you can return tomorrow night with tonight’s tickets.”
The audience hushes. The lights dim. Spotlights stab a stage dotted by a handful of sheer silk screens stretched in abstract shapes.
A few young men clad only in loin-cloths emerge on to the stage, rolling and crawling to contemporary string music.
The show, Mid-Summer Night – The Unspeakable Nothing, is the latest performance put on by Tsao’s troupe, the Guangdong Modern Dance Company (GMDC).
“I only say a few words to them,” Tsao says. “I let them do their own thing.”
Dubbed the father of China’s modern dance, Tsao is the founder and artistic director of the three highest-profile modern dance companies in Beijing, Guangzhou and Hong Kong, all of which have toured the globe. He has also dabbled in filmmaking, producing a number of feature films such as East Palace, West Palace about gay men in Beijing.
He has won numerous accolades. He was once voted Dancer of the Year in Hong Kong and one of the SAR’s 10 outstanding young persons. He was given the Bronze Bauhinia Star Medal for his contribution to Hong Kong’s performing arts. Tsao’s dancers, performing his works, have won gold medals at the Paris International Modern Dance Competition several years in a row.
He founded Hong Kong’s first modern dance troupe, City Contemporary Dance Company (CCDC), in 1979. In 1992 he became the founding artistic director of the Guangdong troupe, China’s first modern dance company, a position he retains today.
After more than two decades of preaching his favorite art, Tsao still offers the audience pre-performance etiquette lectures, both in China and overseas. Perhaps there’s still a long way to go in his pilgrimage?
“It’s normal to ask the audience to turn off mobile phones in a small theater,” he says, acknowledging that modern dance is a high art that plays only to small audiences.
“We don’t have to draw the largest audience or sell [tickets] for the highest price,” he says.
Tsao has written numerous articles battling critics who say his art lacks “Chineseness.”
Does this lack of popular appeal stem from the fact that modern dance is too far outside Chinese tradition?
“What’s Chinese tradition?” he says. “I don’t believe modern dance belongs only to the West.”
He laughs at the fact that people regard dancers in ancient costumes performing to traditional music as Chinese while shows in modern clothes with modern music are “Western.”
“So our current modern society is not Chinese?” he asks.
The so-called Chinese tradition in many minds is the rigid style of art and living that evolved from the Song Dynasty, which amplified centuries-old Confucian ethical rules. Oppressive regimes and traditions such as foot-binding followed. “Confucianism oppresses the body,” Tsao says.
But to Tsao, modern dance has long existed in freewheeling Taoism, and in the cosmopolitan Tang Dynasty when women wore revealing clothes.
“Modern dance speaks with the body,” he says. “And Taoists who practiced tai chi and qi gong respect the body,” he says.
He spreads his arms and shakes his body, imitating “The Seven Sages of Bamboo Forest,” the poets who became famous – or infamous – for their habit of roaming about bamboo groves naked and drunk around 400 AD. The poets, once seen as rep-resentatives of the free spirit of ancient China, are now promoted by contemporary artists. “They must have performed like modern dancers,” he smiles.
Even Buddhism, which originated in India, and traditional Chinese instruments such as the two-stringed erhu, which is believed to have originated in Central Asia, were foreign imports, he says.
In a bid to ridicule so-called Chineseness, Tsao choreographed a lavish performance – 365 Ways of Doing and Undoing Orientalism in 2002. He adapted all the China cliches: acrobatics, calligraphy, martial sword-fights, kung fu kicks, Beijing Opera, the cheongsam, tai chi, the dragon dance and the long sleeve-throwing repertoire of Chinese folk dance.
“I just wanted to constantly provoke people’s thoughts about the Orient,” he says.
While many applauded the performance, some critics bristled at Tsao’s sarcasm and published lengthy articles attacking the show for failing to promote Chinese culture. The criticism became Tsao’s ammunition for more articles and seminars to promote modern dance.
“Modern dance was born from rebellion against tradition,” he wrote. “Its development in China depends on how it can gradually walk out of the trammels of tradition.”
Tsao’s artistic journey started from his own rebellion – from his family’s garment-making tradition. At the age of 15, he saw his first modern dance show by a foreign troupe in Hong Kong City Hall, then the SAR’s only theater complex. The art clicked with him instantly.
“It’s about expressing inner emo-tions. The dancers made me feel I could be one of them,” he recalls. “I had watched ballet and classical dance before, but couldn’t relate to the princes or the heroes they portrayed.”
His parents, who escaped from Shanghai in 1949, ran a garment business in Kowloon. The family sent him to Pacific Lutheran University in the US to study business. There he enrolled in modern dance classes and has been hooked ever since.
After graduating with a business degree, Tsao returned to Hong Kong to continue postgraduate business studies. But his love for modern dance was undimmed. Even his master’s thesis was a feasibility study of Hong Kong’s performing arts. He joined the family business after graduation.
“In the 1970s, Hong Kong was a cultural desert. We had only Cantonese opera. Then I thought, why couldn’t Hong Kong have art? Does it only belong to the West?”
In 1979, with his family’s support, he took some money from the business and gathered a dozen friends, second-generation migrants like himself, to form CCDC, a local troupe which was joined by an international force including a Greek, two Britons and an Australian.
Tsao worked in the garment factory during the day and ran the troupe at night. His first piece was about Vietnamese refugees and the performance sold only 50 tickets.
“Many people didn’t know what dance was, let alone modern dance,” he says.
CCDC would later change its strategy, touring schools and universities where its performances were met with enthusiasm.
Meanwhile, the mainland, breaking free from the coils of decades of communism and millennia of hidebound tradition, was getting a taste of all things modern and Western. Modern dance had been banned for decades, especially during the Cultural Revolution, as capitalist and decadent although it had been introduced in China by Wu Xiaobang who learned it in Japan in the 1930s.
Guangzhou was the first city to rekindle the flames of modern dance. In 1987, the Guangdong Dance School, which was established in the 1950s to produce revolutionary ballet and folk dance, invited Tsao and American choreographers to teach.
After the 1989 massacre of students in Tiananmen Square, the American exchange program stopped. Tsao was hired to teach full-time. He turned up the day after the massacre to discover many of Guangzhou’s streets were deserted.
That teaching job became crucial to his mainland modern dance career. In 1992, the government formed what was then called the Guangdong Modern Experimental Dance Troupe to accommodate Tsao’s graduates and hired him as artistic director. He donated his money to build a theater.
Since then he has been given a free hand to run his show. He says he’s hardly censored in the mainland.
The occasional nudity in Tsao’s shows has been accepted in Guangzhou and Beijing since the early 1990s but it has met with numerous complaints in Hong Kong.
“Censorship is more about politics among people,” he says. “Every place has its own social codes.”
On another occasion, Tsao had to change a sequence about death in his Chinese Winds, Chinese Fires program touring in Munich in 1994 after a Chinese student there praised it to the accompanying Guangdong cultural official for allowing the performance on June 4, raising the supervisor’s suspicions on the meaning of the segment.
“Modern dance doesn’t aim to fight against the party or the government,” he says, “It’s about expression of the individual.” He adds that the government sees the performances as “powerless” even if subversive because the audiences are so small.
A large part of Tsao’s mainland commitment is in teaching. He has taught in the Beijing Dance Academy since 1988 and was later invited to take over the Beijing Modern Dance Company, which he funds solely with his own money. The troupe was selected to showcase modern Chinese arts and culture to journalists covering Beijing’s Olympic bid.
In 2004, the troupe achieved national recognition when it accompanied President Hu Jintao on his tour to South America, along with an acrobatic group from Shenyang and a Yunnan folk dance show.
Now his Guangdong dance company is creating history again. It became part of a unit comprising the Xinghai Concert Hall and the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra to be privatized by the government, on direct order from the State Council.
Tsao holds 40 percent of the dance company’s shares, while the provincial government owns the rest. But more than half of the funds still come from his pocket. “The market is what we create. Now we have a brand – the creative beauty of modern dance. That’s what we sell.”
To keep his troupe afloat, Tsao has to choreograph advertising shows for shampoo, credit cards or real estate. But he insists such commercialism doesn’t affect the purity of his art because it is still about creativity.
Perhaps the most reliable source of income comes from overseas, where his dancers earn hundreds of thousands of yuan per tour. He’s taking GMDC to Poland and Denmark this week and all three dance companies to the US and Canada in October.
With salaries of just 2,000 yuan (HK$1,900) a month, Tsao’s dancers must perform in clubs or events to make ends meet. Even Tsao confesses he’s so busy running the dance companies that he can only choreograph a new show every two years.
But he is optimistic. “The day modern dance came to China, we started to liberate our bodies. Our Renaissance has started, because the Renaissance in the West was about liberation of the body.”
He fondly tells me even official dance competitions are allowing modern dance moves. Such steps are unstoppable. Just look at the way the Chinese dress these days, Tsao says, his eyes glittering.
“After centuries of ignoring the body,” he adds, “youngsters are accepting the body and enjoying the body. As they start to learn about the body, they’ll change their thinking, and eventually China.”
