Latest / Arts Unscripted with Monica Holt / CI to Eye | Staging Classical Works for Today's Audiences

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CI to Eye | Staging Classical Works for Today's Audiences · Arts Unscripted with Monica Holt

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Hi everyone. Dan here.
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A core part of introducing new audiences to our art forms is showing them both
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the exciting new works as well as "the classics":
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those canonical treasures that embody the rich traditions of your genre.
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But what do we do when the classics start to feel outdated for today's
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audiences, or even at odds with our missions? In the dance world,
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some of our most celebrated story ballets like The Nutcracker and La Bayadère
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can include harmful portrayals of non-Western cultures-portrayals that
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perpetuate misconceptions and reinforce cultural biases.
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Today's audiences are not just taking notice, they're taking action.
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Earlier this year, I met up with Phil Chan,
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president of the Gold Standard Arts Foundation and co-founder of the Final Bow
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for Yellowface campaign. Since 2017,
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he's advised countless performing arts groups on how to maintain the integrity
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of works from the classical Western canon while updating outdated
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representations of Asians.
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Phil was such a fun and generous guest who showed us what's possible when
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performing arts organizations approach classical works with cultural sensitivity
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and authenticity. No matter your organization's genre,
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we all strive to program works that reflect the rich tapestry of human
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experiences.
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Today's episode continues an important conversation about honoring the
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traditions of our art forms while ensuring they remain well-loved for
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generations to come. We've got a lot to discuss, so let's dive in, shall we?
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We have a real treat for you today. I'm here with Phil Chan, a dancer,
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choreographer, writer, and fierce champion for Asian voices in dance and beyond.
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Phil, welcome to CI to Eye!
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Thank you for having me.
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So let's jump right in.
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Do you remember the exact moment that you fell in love with dance?
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What drew you to pursue a career as an artist?
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Yeah,
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my mother was actually flying back to Hong Kong where we were living,
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and she was stuck in Tokyo overnight. I think her flight was canceled.
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And she was sitting next to a dancer from the Hong Kong Ballet,
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and they ended up talking and catching the next flight out of Tokyo together and
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becoming friends. So growing up,
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my mom used to take me to the ballet and I was a kid with a lot of energy and
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bouncing off the walls, and Don said, well,
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why don't you try him out with ballet? And that sort of stuck.
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But I think that I really fell in love with dance after seeing
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the movie Strictly Ballroom.
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And there's a scene where the main character is sort of in the dance studio at
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night dancing by himself,
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and there was something about that scene where I was like, wow,
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I really identify with being able to express something that we just
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don't have the words for. And I really related to that. So really,
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really grateful for dance and the opportunity to share that passion with other
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people.
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Amazing.
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At what point did you start to question choreographic depictions of Asian
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culture? Were there moments early in your dance training,
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or certain performances that you attended, that raised alarm bells?
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Yeah, I mean, of course I grew up with The Nutcracker, and as a young dancer,
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you're just sort of given what people put in front of you and you look around
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and everybody else was doing Chinese in a sort of caricatured way.
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So if everyone else is doing it, how can it possibly be wrong or bad?
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I remember going to see a production of Alexei Ratmansky's Sleeping Beauty.
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I think it was around 2015 at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City,
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and I'm a huge dance history nerd.
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So the fact that we could go and see this production that was really trying to
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recreate sort of the old style and the old sets,
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it was just stepping into a time capsule and going back in time.
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And so I was thoroughly enjoying myself. And then in the third act,
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these sort of porcelain prince and princess characters come out and with the
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sort of rice patty hats and this sort of stereotyped caricature bowing and
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shuffling, and I just remember thinking like, oh, we are recreating the past,
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but also recreating these very old,
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antiquated ways of depicting Asian people. And it just didn't feel right to me.
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I remember having a conversation with Alexei about that production at that time,
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and I wasn't really an advocate,
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I was just an audience member who happened to know him personally.
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And so I didn't quite have the vocabulary to really articulate why
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it bothered me so much.
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It really wasn't until I had a conversation with Peter Martins,
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who was the artistic director of New York City Ballet at the time.
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My very good friend, Georgina Pazcoguin,
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was a soloist with New York City Ballet and also in one of their diversity
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committees. And in that committee,
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they were talking about the different issues that the company had.
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And one of the issues that came up was
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how the different nationalities in Balanchine's Nutcracker were depicted in the
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second act. And Gina, she said, well, I'm in the Company.
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I'd rather have an outsider talk to you about this.
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And also somebody who is Chinese who can speak to the lived experience of being
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in the minority as a Chinese person and what that experience and that impact on
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this work would be. Gina basically just called me and was like, Hey,
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I'm in between rehearsals. I can't really talk,
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but I gave Peter Martins your number, he might be calling you about Nutcracker.
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Got to go. Bye. And that was all the context I got.
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Just for dance novices on the podcast,
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can you explain the Chinese dance in The Nutcracker?
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Sure. So in The Nutcracker, it's about a little girl,
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either Marie or Clara depending on what production it is.
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But in the second act,
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she's transported into the Kingdom of Sweets and you get sort of an
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it's-a-small-world tour of all these different cultures represented through
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confection. So there's Spanish chocolate,
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there's Chinese tea, there's Arabian coffee,
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and so some of the cultures are represented with a lot of character.
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They were researched. So Petipa, Marius Petipa, who was the choreographer,
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was a principal dancer in Spain and working in Russian at the time.
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So the Russian dance, the Spanish dance...
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pretty authentic and positive representations of these cultures,
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whereas the Arabian dance, the Chinese dance,
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were really just sort of treated as these fantasy exotic dances
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that really weren't based in anything real culturally,
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but were based on the little pieces of information that Europeans had at the
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time of these cultures. So, often highly caricatured,
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often in yellowface,
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which is a performer exaggerating their features to look more Asian.
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Sometimes yellowface manifests in physicalizations like shuffling and
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bowing, even making fun of people's accents.
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So that's generally how these depictions
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were of Chinese and Arabian. So Peter eventually called me,
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and this was 2017, and so we talked,
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it was probably about half an hour or so in his office,
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and we talked about the history of how Asians have been represented on our
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stages in theater and opera and dance,
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then later in television and film,
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and then also what sort of contributions Asian folks have had in terms of their
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depictions in ballet, specifically the history of The Nutcracker,
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and just realizing that we have a lot of these outside exotic portrayals of
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Asians, but none by Asian people.
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So you start having these conversations with New York City Ballet on
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re-imagining their Chinese dance for The Nutcracker.
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Was that the impetus for Final Bow for Yellowface?
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So yeah, New York City Ballet,
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the Company was founded by George Balanchine,
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who was the original choreographer of this production of The Nutcracker.
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It's probably the most widely performed production of The Nutcracker in the
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United States. It's a really big cultural force,
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and so if Peter's willing to change,
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why not every company in America? Why not every company in the world?
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And so we bought yellowface.org for I think $10 at the time,
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and we put up a simple pledge that says essentially, I love ballet,
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and because of that I'm not going to do yellowface on our stages anymore.
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I love that wording as well. I love ballet, so I will not do this.
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It's a preservation of the art form, is to evolve with the times.
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And I think it really comes from a place of love and exactly what you say is we
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are trying to practice inclusive advocacy,
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so folks that are listening who-they want to change the world,
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or they have an issue that they want to change.
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Instead of going to somebody and saying, Hey, you need to change,
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put yourself into the problem with the people you're trying to convince and say,
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Hey, we both love this thing and we together need to change it.
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And I think that's a big part of our success at this point.
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Pretty much every major American ballet company has signed our pledge.
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A lot of the big European companies have signed on in the last couple of years.
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Four out of five of the biggest companies in the UK have signed on to this
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conversation. So it's really had this beautiful ripple effect.
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The Paris Opera a couple of years ago did their first diversity report ever.
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This is our oldest performing arts organization in the West founded by Louis
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XIV, and in their diversity report,
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they cited Gina and I by name as a contributing factor to their decision to no
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longer do blackface or yellowface in both the opera and the ballet.
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So it's really had this beautiful ripple effect of just
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asking our art forms to see each other with more nuance
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and more empathy. So I'm very proud of that.
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Yeah,
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it almost feels like there is a tipping point where so many people have signed
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on. Did you feel that at all, or...?
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Yeah, I think I've been able to see that progress in hindsight.
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What we found with Final Bow for Yellowface, though,
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was that this wasn't actually the start of the conversation.
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What we did with Final Bow for Yellowface was really consolidate a lot of these
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conversations that were already happening so that we could actually say, Hey,
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we all want to do better. We all want more Asian students,
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Asian parents to get involved, Asian people to buy tickets and join our board,
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and because of that, we need to do better.
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So it was a way to just be that gathering of this
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conversation.
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Yeah.
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And did you meet any resistance from audience members when it came to
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adapting and changing some of the choreography?
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Yeah, I think we got a lot of resistance at first.
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Change is hard for a lot of people.
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There's a feeling that if you change something, you lose something.
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But I think for us it was, well, what are we actually losing?
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Which is offensive caricatures of Asian people.
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And the whole point of our campaign was not to just cancel anything. In fact,
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I think our campaign is really the antithesis of cancel culture, right?
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Cancel culture would be saying, well,
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this is racist and you can't do The Nutcracker anymore.
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We're not canceling The Nutcracker. We're saying, Hey,
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The Nutcracker could be better. Let's keep the choreography,
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but let's find better costuming,
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better choices to make so that it doesn't have that negative impact on
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people.
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So it's about keeping our heritage alive as dancers,
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but also being respectful to Asian people and culture.
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So now you're the president of Gold Standard Arts Foundation.
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Tell us more about that work.
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So the sort of evolution of this conversation and where we are at now
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is looking at these ballet companies and saying, wow,
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we have so many depictions of Asian culture and Asian people,
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Asian characters in our repertory-The Miraculous Mandarin, Le Corsaire,
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La Bayadère-all these sort of stories and characters that take place in Asia,
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but how many Asian artists actually work in these companies?
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How many Asian choreographers have ever been hired to make work on their own
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terms? So getting companies to not just stop doing yellowface,
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but to hire Asian artists as well.
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That was really the impetus for this next step of the conversation,
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which was the formation of the Gold Standard Arts Foundation.
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We realized that we needed much more infrastructure in place than
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just two people in their spare time doing advocacy on a website.
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But I think the real tipping point for us was the horrific
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shooting in Atlanta a couple years ago that claimed the lives of
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eight people, six of them who were Asian women.
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And it just felt like in the weeks after that,
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the entire dance community were coming to me and Gina and saying, okay,
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what's the action item? What's the hashtag? What do we do?
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How do we make this better? How do we fix this? We were like,
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we're just two people on a website. What do you mean?
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What are we supposed to do with it?
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We were dealing with our own anger and frustration and grief and
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responding to this, but then we looked around and realized, oh,
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we are the Asians in the room,
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and we weren't equipped to serve that.
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And so we started reaching out to other Asian-American leaders to
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sort of form this group, and
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they then became sort of our board and our artistic advisory board of the Gold
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Standard Arts Foundation to really be a service organization for
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Asian creatives in dance.
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Yeah. That's a lot of pressure to be, as you said,
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"the Asians in the room." Was that a lot of emotional labor?
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Yeah, absolutely. It's exhausting.
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Even my own work as a scholar, as a historian,
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looking through hundreds of years of racist depictions of Asians...
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I've done a couple of research fellowships.
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I was lucky enough to go to Paris this last April and study with the French
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National Art History Institute.
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So going through the Paris Opera archives every day and just looking at stacks
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and stacks of these orientalist depictions, set designs, costumes,
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librettos of these sort of fantasy Asian people.
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And I just remember leaving the library at the end of the day and thinking like,
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God, I'm just, the weight of it is so exhausting.
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It sounds exhausting.
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And then paired with, you know, then open the newspaper and you see, oh,
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another Asian woman's been shoved onto the subway or followed home and stalked
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home and stabbed to death in her apartment.
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And it's just heartbreaking.
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But this is our little way of pushing back in our
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little corner of the world and
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just hoping that it gets bigger and it
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has legs and just seeing the good work that's happening in Hollywood and film
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and TV and theater and opera.
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There are parallel conversations happening in a lot of our art forms,
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and I think a lot of us who are in the arts are realizing that if we
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have better portrayals of Asian people in our art,
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then maybe we'll be treated better in society as well.
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Yeah, this work definitely expands beyond the ballet world.
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And you recently worked on the opera Madama Butterfly.
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Can you tell us what it was like delving into opera?
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Yeah. It was my first opera, so it was my directorial debut.
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It was my first big swing at an opera.
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So the similar parallel conversations that we were having around yellowface
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and Asian representation in ballet,
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the Asian Opera Alliance-AOA-was having around opera.
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I was approached by Boston Lyric Opera to look at Madama Butterfly
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as a work.
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They realized that they as an organization were not in a place where they could
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responsibly produce this work considering what was
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happening in the world around them.
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And so they instead devoted their resources to a year long conversation called
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The Butterfly Process,
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and we brought together folks from across the performing arts
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ecosystems-so directors, scholars, producers, singers,
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librettists, historians... to look at this work,
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examine it. What's the problem with Madama Butterfly?
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What are the issues that it brings up,
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and what's a way forward for this work? So we looked at Orientalism as a
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genre, We looked at the archetypes of women,
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we looked at the history of the opera itself, to try and unpack:
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what exactly are we doing?
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What are we doing when we tell this geisha story over and over again?
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That process led to a re-imagining of Madama
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Butterfly, which I made my directorial debut in this past September.
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The challenge was how do we keep Puccini's immortal music?
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This is what we all love.
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It's just some of the most beautiful music in the Western canon.
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How do we keep the music alive,
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but not fall into the same tired Orientalist tropes that have plagued this
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opera,
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especially when Asian women were being treated the way they were treated the
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last couple of years during Covid.
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And so what emerged was a really beautiful
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reexamination of this work that supported the music,
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but also decentered the strictly European way of looking at the world,
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and instead changed the perspective, the center of the story,
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to being a story about Asian-Americans. We set in in the 1940s.
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The first act took place in a Chinatown nightclub.
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The second and third act took place in a Japanese incarceration camp.
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The opera just received the "Best of 2023" in The Washington Post,
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in the Boston Globe, and in Broadway World. So really, really,
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really pleased with the reception of that.
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And I was also not alone in that process.
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I worked alongside an entire team of Asian and Asian-American creatives to
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reimagine this work.
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So there's so many different ways of doing this work if you're willing to be
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creative and to open your mind just a little bit.
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You've written about the difference between character and caricature.
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Can you share more about that perspective and where you personally draw the line
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between the two?
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Yeah, so I think character,
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if you think about maybe your favorite character in a movie or a book,
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it's really somebody with nuance, somebody you can empathize with.
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Characters are three dimensional. They're sort of in on the joke,
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whereas caricatures are often shorthand. They're two dimensional,
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they're flattened, they're sort of the butt of the joke.
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So think about the difference between say your favorite movie character and say
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a caricature of a politician on, say,
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Saturday Night Live or something like that. That's really just a shorthand.
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It's meant to be just a joke or sort of
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not a fully fleshed out portrayal. And just finding that,
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looking around,
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there are so few accurate representations of Asian people or Asian
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characters with integrity and all of these sort of jokey chinky
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kind of depictions. As a young Asian dancer, that's
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not really constructive in terms of getting people to come into this art form,
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to feel included, and to take it as part of their own,
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claim this art form as their own. So this larger conversation we were trying to
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have was not just about some makeup and bowing and shuffling,
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but how do we make this art form from a Eurocentric art form into something that
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is multiracial, global, diverse,
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and that reflects the audience and the community that we are serving here in the
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21st century. An example of that is,
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I was privileged enough to work with Peter Boal at Pacific Northwest Ballet,
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at PNB,
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and he was actually one of the leaders of this conversation before Final Bow for
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Yellowface. He was already chewing on this issue.
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And the challenge for Peter was,
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how do we keep this beloved Balanchine choreography, which has been handed down,
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which is considered a masterpiece, but remove the Asian caricature?
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And I remember one day he called me up and he said, Hey, Phil,
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promise you won't laugh, but I have an idea for Chinese. I said, okay, shoot.
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And he says, the dance, I'll just describe the dance for you.
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So essentially there's two women who come out and they're pushing a box,
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and they sort of do this vaudeville bit, like, oh, what's in the box?
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What's in the box? And they open the box and out pops a Chinese man,
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and he's usually dressed...
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he has the rice patty hat and the queue hairstyle and the fumanchu mustache and
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usually yellowface. And he sort of does these big jumps.
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And then he sort of jumps back in the box and the ladies wheel him off stage
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again. And Peter said, okay, so what if instead of this Chinese man in the box,
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what if it's a Chinese cricket? And I said, Peter, that is brilliant.
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A cricket in Chinese culture is a symbol of good luck, of good fortune,
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of spring.
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It's the perfect gift to give to a young lady who's blossoming into womanhood.
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It's something that all classes of people have enjoyed.
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And also it's a musical creature.
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Balanchine dancers like to say they're the most musical of dancers.
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And so it really fits with the choreography. It's a lot of big jumps.
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And crickets live in a little box, so it's literally a perfect complement
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to the dance, and it doesn't feel clichéd.
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It's one example of what that swing from caricature to character really looks
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like.
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The perfect evolution.
23:15
Exactly.
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So that production is alive and well in Seattle's Pacific Northwest Ballet.
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So if anyone has a chance to check that out,
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it's just such a lovely way to honor Balanchine's choreography but also respect
23:27
Chinese heritage and culture.
23:29
So clever.
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You've consulted for a long list of ballet companies.
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How do you convince ballet purists that classic works should be
23:39
updated?
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To the ballet purists,
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we're actually keeping the dance heritage going forward in the future.
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We're not canceling these works, right? We're not saying don't do them.
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We're saying there's a better way to do them.
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I have some skin in the game as well.
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I'm literally about to head off to Indiana where I'm working with Indiana
23:59
University to stage a full-length production of La Bayadère.
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So for folks who don't know, that's sort of like the Aida of ballet.
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It takes place in an exotic India,
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and it's about a temple dancer who's in love with the most noble warrior in the
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land, but he's betrothed to the princess. Again,
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this ballet comes from the 1870s,
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so really it's pretty old and not really what we know of
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as accurately being India or Indian culture.
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So we're staging a version of this.
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We're going back and reconstructing that choreography from the 1870s,
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but we're setting the ballet in sort of a 1920s Hollywood. So
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again, preserving that dance history,
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making it accessible for a future generation,
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but also just avoiding the racial caricature.
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So to people who want to see La Bayadère done with turbans and saris,
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there's so many video productions of it all over the internet at your
24:57
local library. Enjoy the video.
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You can watch it over and over again in the comfort of your living room forever.
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But we are making art for living, diverse,
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21st century audiences now. So that's who we're serving,
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and that's what the art has to be,
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or else it just becomes like a quaint exercise.
25:16
It's like a Civil War reenactment where it doesn't really mean anything.
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It becomes almost more irrelevant. Yeah.
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Yeah, yeah.
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It's a relic of the past as opposed to something that is art for the present.
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So that's really our approach.
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Do you think it's important to have those old recordings that people can look
25:34
back on?
25:35
Absolutely. If we don't know where we've been in the past,
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how do we know where we're going in the future?
25:44
How do you break the rules if you don't know what the rules are?
25:47
So I was a Jerome Robbins Fellow at the New York Public Library where I looked
25:51
at about 200 Orientalist ballets from Louis XIV to today.
25:56
So stories set in exotic India or China or the Middle East,
26:01
and really trying to ask myself: beyond the costuming,
26:07
what was the appeal of setting a story someplace not Europe,
26:12
someplace unfamiliar, someplace exotic, "over there"?
26:18
And
26:20
my thesis essentially was that Orientalism probably served as the
26:25
greatest driver of creativity and innovation in the Western performing arts,
26:29
because when you don't know what those people over there look like,
26:32
what their customs are, what their music sounds like,
26:34
what their costumes look like, you get to make it up.
26:38
And so you get to break all of the rules that we do things
26:43
because it's not about us, it's about someone else over there.
26:46
And so you're able to explore the boundaries of human psychology,
26:52
imagine fantastic buildings that wouldn't be possible because we don't
26:57
have buildings like that in France or in England,
27:00
but who knows what those other cultures have.
27:03
It reminds me of sci-fi and fantasy, how that works as well.
27:06
Absolutely. Absolutely. And so again, from those fantasies,
27:11
then you can innovate. So one example is exotic rhythms,
27:16
like a five four rhythm. So it's like beats of five.
27:21
In Europe, we do the minuette, the polka, the waltz. Two four, three four,
27:25
four four.
27:26
Who knows what those exotic people over there, what their music sounds like?
27:30
Well, let's just add an extra beat. Let's make it five four. And then nowadays,
27:34
Dave Brubeck's "Take Five," right?
27:37
That's just music now. But you have to remember how radical that was.
27:42
Stravinsky, all those different time signatures,
27:45
that wouldn't have been possible if we didn't say, well,
27:47
let's imagine what a non-European way of doing music would sound
27:52
like, even if it's not authentic.
27:55
And just that process of imagining gets you to expand what is possible
28:00
in music. And the same goes for architecture, costume design, fashion, music,
28:05
painting, all of it was really inspired by the rule breaking that was
28:10
allowed in Orientalism.
28:12
So you need to know what came before. You need to know that history.
28:18
How do you move an art form forward if you don't understand the past?
28:23
So that's really our approach as well,
28:24
is to make sure that we have a keen sense of the history,
28:29
but also use that to inform the future as a springboard for what's
28:33
next.
28:34
Yeah, it's a case of honesty and authenticity,
28:37
being honest of where we've been and authentic going forwards.
28:41
And I think also having integrity.
28:44
I think we confuse authenticity with integrity.
28:48
An example of that is,
28:49
I was curating an exhibition at Drexel University about chinoiserie in fashion,
28:54
and one of the pieces we were looking at was this
28:58
dress from a French designer,
29:00
and it had all these Chinese phoenixes as a motif on the dress.
29:04
And if you saw the dress, you'd say, oh, that's a dress with pretty birds on it.
29:09
But as a Chinese person, you see them and you say, ah,
29:11
it's very imbalanced because the phoenix would never just appear without the
29:15
dragon symbol.
29:16
So you just wouldn't put those symbols like that.
29:20
So while no one would argue that it's not an authentic Chinese phoenix,
29:24
it doesn't have integrity because the symbols aren't being used in the right
29:28
way. Or say another example is maybe using a sacred Native American headdress
29:33
to get drunk and wear to a music festival. No one would say, oh,
29:37
that's not a Navajo headdress that's authentic.
29:40
But you lack integrity the way you're using it.
29:44
So I think sometimes we confuse authenticity and integrity.
29:47
So really just making sure we understand the difference in those things as well
29:51
when we're talking about these issues and teasing them out.
30:00
Do you think choreographic depictions of Asian culture can impact society's
30:05
broader treatment of Asian-Americans?
30:07
Yeah, absolutely. And if we portray people as flat caricatures,
30:12
how are we ever going to see them with nuance? And that goes for
30:18
how we see Jewish people and antisemitism,
30:21
how we see Black people and blackface. All of these things are connected.
30:26
So if we have any hope of seeing our friends and neighbors and colleagues
30:31
with more nuance, we have to look at what are we putting on stage?
30:36
Art is a mirror to society,
30:39
and so really thinking about those depictions and being more
30:43
mindful, being more deliberate,
30:47
and being more thoughtful I think only serves us better,
30:50
especially when there's so much division in our society
30:55
right now.
30:55
I think we need art with better representation so that we can really see each
31:00
other with more nuance.
31:02
So looking ahead for the next five or 10 years,
31:04
what's your hope for Asian representation?
31:07
Well,
31:09
I just hope that we have the opportunity to tell our stories with integrity,
31:15
have the resources to do that. Honestly,
31:21
we're sort of in the stepping stone period where I feel like we're making a
31:25
special lane for Asian people just because we haven't had that before,
31:29
which is lovely. I'd love to not be considered as an Asian choreographer,
31:33
but just as a choreographer, or not as an Asian writer, but just as a writer.
31:39
But I do understand that we do need to have this stepping stone.
31:43
It can sometimes feel tokenistic,
31:45
but it's also a necessary step to get to a place where we can
31:49
just be,
31:51
just make art where it's not about our race or our gender or sexuality.
31:55
We can just be seen as artists.
31:57
But especially if you're coming from an underrepresented group historically,
32:03
sometimes a dedicated lane to get you there, to build that equity,
32:08
is sometimes an important step. So I think that's where we are at now
32:13
with not just Asian folks, but with a lot of other groups as well.
32:17
We're getting there. There's growing pains with that.
32:19
But I do see a very bright future where we will be more
32:24
interwoven with the art that's coming out in our communities that
32:29
better reflect all of us,
32:30
and we're able to take our specific stories and make them universal and make
32:35
other people share that.
32:37
And why that's important is I think that that allows us to see each other
32:42
better, to see people... as opposed to highlighting our differences,
32:46
maybe seeing where we're similar.
32:49
And I think that's where we're going to next.
32:52
I'm very excited to be sort of riding this wave with so many other Asian folks
32:57
too.
32:59
If someone wants to learn more about the work you do,
33:01
what resources should they check out first?
33:04
Yeah, I mean, they can go to yellowface.org,
33:07
which is the conversation about Final Bow for Yellowface.
33:10
I've written a couple books about the issue: Final Bow for Yellowface,
33:14
my first book. Banishing Orientalism was my second book.
33:17
And I'm actually just finishing my third book,
33:20
which is about my experience directing Madama Butterfly, and then of course,
33:24
check out the Gold Standard Arts Foundation and all of the incredible work we're
33:28
doing to support the Asian community.
33:30
And it's not just for dancers and choreographers,
33:33
it's for any Asian artists who want to work in dance. So lighting designers,
33:36
costume designers, librettists, set designers, filmmakers.
33:41
We offer professional development opportunities to the community.
33:45
So I just led a session on grant writing while Asian. Okay,
33:49
so you're applying for funds.
33:50
How do you talk about your heritage when you're applying for money?
33:54
How do you talk to donors about what you're trying to do,
33:56
especially if they're not Asian? We're gearing up to hopefully offer
34:00
choreographic residencies and offer real financial supports,
34:03
give grants to emerging Asian artists.
34:06
We have a creative database of Asian artists, so when somebody says, Hey,
34:10
I'm looking for a costume designer for my new production of Swan Lake,
34:15
why not hire an Asian person? We've got a whole list.
34:19
But I'm also really proud of a series of Asian dance festivals that we are
34:23
producing called 10,000 Dreams.
34:25
10,000 is sort of the biggest number in a lot of Asian cultures.
34:30
It just sort of means a lot, a lot, a lot.
34:32
So 10,000 is the biggest number you could think of. But 10,000 Dreams,
34:36
it started out as a virtual choreographic festival during Covid,
34:39
where every day in the month of May,
34:41
we profiled a different choreographer of Asian descent,
34:44
and we had a digital film of their work.
34:47
And that really came about when a lot of the artistic directors we were talking
34:52
to said, okay, we're not doing Yellowface anymore.
34:55
We'd love to hire an Asian choreographer, but I can't find a name.
34:58
Nobody's on my radar. Nobody's ready yet.
35:00
Nobody fits in with our company. And so I said, okay,
35:05
well, you can't find any? I'm going to give you 31.
35:08
I'm going to give you one every day.
35:09
And I'm so pleased that so many of those artists that we profiled then have
35:13
received commissions. And this was a couple years ago.
35:16
And now that Covid is sort of on the retreat,
35:20
we're able to do these choreographic festivals live in person.
35:25
So all of that is happening under this umbrella of the Gold Standard Arts
35:28
Foundation. And so also, if you're looking for collaborators,
35:32
if you want to tell a story that happens in Asia,
35:34
if you have characters that are Asian, reach out. Talk to us. Let's collaborate.
35:39
I think that's the best way to tell stories with integrity is to
35:44
practice that inclusion. So culture is meant to be shared.
35:49
I think there's a lot of fear of cultural appropriation,
35:52
but at the end of the day, culture is meant to be shared, right?
35:56
That's how we understand each other and understand the world,
36:00
and it's-how do we do that with integrity?
36:02
And the way to do that is by including people. Okay,
36:05
you want to tell a Chinese story? Make sure I'm in the room with you.
36:09
Let's tell that story together.
36:11
It's going to be a better story if we do it together.
36:13
Awesome.
36:15
If you could broadcast one message to the executive directors, leadership teams,
36:20
staff and boards of thousands of arts organizations, what would it be?
36:26
Ooh. That's tough. I feel like that's already what I'm doing already with you,
36:31
talking to you. Yeah. I think it's,
36:35
if you want to survive, if you don't want us to be redundant,
36:39
if you want us to stay relevant,
36:41
if you want to make sure we're hitting our ticket sales goals and our donation
36:45
goals, and the enrollment in our schools are high,
36:50
and we want there to be an interest and a love that is cultivated for these art
36:55
forms for the future, we need to think much, much bigger.
36:59
That involves seeing each other with more nuance.
37:01
That involves bringing people in who we normally might not think
37:06
belongs here,
37:07
and we need to do that for the sake of keeping our art... to survive.
37:13
Change is baked into our equation as well.
37:16
I like to think of change in the performing arts as sort of like the difference
37:20
between a museum and a garden. I live right down the street from the
37:25
Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the Brooklyn Museum, right next to each other.
37:29
The curator at the museum has a very different job than the curator at the
37:33
botanic gardens. So the job of the static arts-so film,
37:39
paintings, sculpture-those don't change.
37:43
You can't change the Mona Lisa, right? It captures the zeitgeist of a moment.
37:47
In order to preserve that,
37:48
you need to make sure that the conditions are controlled,
37:53
that it's not too warm, not too humid, it's out of the sun.
37:57
You really have to protect the art. Whereas with the performing arts,
38:01
it's like a living organic thing. It's like the trees.
38:04
You need fertilizer, you need sun, you need rain, you need pollenators,
38:08
you need bugs, you need pruning.
38:13
And that's very much how I approach the works of the performing arts.
38:17
Change is part of the equation because we, as people, change.
38:21
Our response to the art also changes, right?
38:23
Old jokes don't land the same way that they used to now.
38:27
Something you might be okay with in the past now comes across as incredibly
38:30
offensive or sexist or racist, whatever. But if there's inherent value in it,
38:35
if there's something beautiful there,
38:37
we need to help the art change to keep it alive. And so that's, I guess,
38:41
our job as creatives in this moment, especially when we're looking to the past,
38:46
to our canon, to our own history and legacy,
38:49
is we need to be open to that change.
38:52
Gosh, I love that metaphor. I really love that.
38:55
What a fantastic point to end on. This has been such a great conversation.
38:58
Phil Chan, thank you so much for joining us.
39:00
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
39:12
Thank you for listening to CI to Eye.
39:14
This episode was edited and produced by Karen McConarty and co-written by Karen
39:18
McConarty and myself, Dan Titmuss.
39:21
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