If you know anything at all about Chinese dancers then chances are you’ve heard of Hou Ying.
Similar to the Irish film “Billy Elliot,” she was noticed at the age of seven, as a child who had remarkable ability to move gracefully, and thanks to the insistence of her music teacher, she found herself by the age of 12 at the famous Dance Academy of Changchun.
Hou Ying went on to become a principal dancer for Shen Wei Dance Company in New York and was called “the dancer with the perfect lines,” until an injury sidelined her dance career. That was over ten years ago.
Undaunted she returned to China and founded the Hou Ying Dance Theater. She still runs that company to ever-growing acclaim but New York is graced with her presence for six weeks as she runs workshops at NYU. I contacted her agent and arranged an interview at the Standard Grill in the meatpacking district of lower Manhattan.
Hou Ying, the woman who is now referred to as “The Kafka of Chinese dance” talked to me openly about the life of a choreographer, her role models, her mentors and where she finds the inspiration to create her pieces.
I asked her who are her favorite choreographers and after a brief pause she smiled and said “ George Balanchine and Pina Bausch.” Here she is picking side by side two choreographers who could not be more different.
Balanchine is the unrivaled genius of classical ballet and put ballet on the map in America by establishing the New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center. Pina Bausch, the mystic goddess of modern dance/theater, singlehandedly created a new form of dance by fusing dialogue with dance movement.
Hou Ying did not feel this yin & yang choice was a contradiction and goes a long way in explaining the openness of her mind and her dances.
Like all great artists, her mind is so deeply open to her culture’s zeitgeist that she unconsciously channels it. This is what Yeats referred to as the ‘spiritus mundi’ which the world’s collective unconscious that the artist willingly submerges into and then returns with both the products and predictions of mankind’s current state.
And as an example of how profound and prescient an artist can be, she was commissioned to choreograph a piece for a museum last year. As she developed the piece she decided for some reason to put her dancers in Hazmat suits. This piece was choreographed two months before anyone ever heard of the coronavirus. As we speak today it is a common sight to see Chinese doctors wearing hazmat suits and citizens wearing breathing masks. This kind of premonition is the product of the artist’s talent and why they say that the artist is years ahead of its culture.
I asked her if she had ever met the world’s greatest dancer, Mikhail Baryshnikov. She said yes, she has, and I casually remarked that he seemed to have the perfect body for a dancer.
She quickly remarked “No. In fact, he is short and does not have long legs at all but he has the one thing that all of the great dancers have. He has the ability to make the impossibly difficult look easy. That is the sign of a truly great dancer. He has charm and humility about him which is also very unique in the truly great.”
I asked her to describe a piece she recently completed and what inspired it. She said the last one she completed was called “Truck,” a piece all about mankind’s unending and unquenchable desires.
“We all desire so much and our desires never stop and never seem to be satisfied,” she said. “We want more money, more food, more fame, more production, more pleasure, more knowledge. I think man’s desires are only growing in size and range. There is no end in sight. I think of the piece as trying to display two things. It tries to give you color which represents these moments joy in the here and now but it also shows the rushed line we are all on as we roar into the future in our quest for more and more and more.”
I thought of the Jerome Robbins masterpiece “Glass Pieces” set to Phillip Glass music. Robbins was trying to show the same thing in his work. He had group workers rushing across the stage in a frenzied effort to get ahead and then on occasion would have a pas de deux dance in the middle of the madness.
And with that, I finished up my interview with Hou Ying, the “Kafka of Chinese dance.” As I drove home and thought what a privilege it is to know such a person and what a blessing to have Hou Ying in the world. She is so similar to some of the greatest athletes that I work with as a sport psychologist. The truly great athlete has an iron will power, a steel backbone, remarkable confidence, and unending courage. These are the four adjectives that aptly describe Hou Ying, the dancer with the perfect lines and a Kafkaesque approach to dance.
