I wrote my thoughts out a few times during the first SITAC portion of the trip, or the first two weeks we were in Beijing. But wifi was intermittent with our changing hotel situation in Beijing, and never reliable, so those thoughts will remain a haphazard collection that shall remain unshared, but I will attempt to summarize them below. I do not say haphazard lightly – there were some serious highs, and serious lows, and that combined with some personal difficulties in my own life, have made for an altogether confused, jumbled experience which has been hard to put into words.
Let me begin with the positives. During the first two and half weeks which we were in Beijing for, we taught these wonderful, inspiring workshops at the No. 4 High School in Beijing. It was all about making dance interdisciplinary, and from my rough sketch of what arts entrepreneurship meant, it made sense to do this – to combine dance with other sectors in society where dance is not normally present, to expand the influence and potential ways arts can be used in, and of course, to learn how to incorporate our passion for dance into our own lives as well. As for me, a pre-med trying to not lose touch with her love for dance, I of course combined dance with the sciences. While Dance Science is a thing (and a field of study, in fact!), it is not something I have actively tracked at Duke. At Duke, dance took a seat after my studies, so I would study first, then dance for a break. The two remained separate, due to both rigid scheduling and lack of opportunities (or perhaps impetus) to combine them. It was a very eye-opening and challenging experience to explore and combine the hard sciences I have spent so long studying, with dance. As I developed my workshops more in detail over the first two weeks in China, I realized not only was it a growing experience for myself, but it also worked! The late nights spent wracking my brain for ideas for my workshops at times seemed so futile, especially after countless revisions to my initial idea, but during the day, in front of our wonderfully receptive students, it would always come together. After four days of exploring the basics of dance movements with Neuroscience, Physics, Biology, and Chemistry, I heard the most touching, positive feedback from students, that made our long exhausting days all the more worthwhile, and validated the work I sometimes questioned I was doing. One of my students, most notably, said that he was never good at school in these subjects, but felt that if he could have learned through dancing, the way we were doing in class, he would have learned so much more. I owe it to our small class of 12 as well, and am ever so grateful to them, for being willing to stick through learning about these basic science principles with me, which no one wants to revisit during their summer vacation (students literally groaned when I pulled out the periodic table during the Chemistry workshop). But they remained willing participants, and active learners, despite many having never danced, and I’m sure most of them not having scientific interests. It also proved to me that this mode of education, of using dance as a medium through which to teach new ideas, is valuable. It can spark motivation in those students that may get left behind in the hypercompetitive education system that fails to fully serve the needs of the more creative, less categorical type. And that is something worth pursuing.
Yet all that good is marred by the difficulties we faced during those 2.5 weeks. While of course, no pilot program is perfect and often times pilot programs fail, I don’t think we arrived ready to face these complications. Everything was so new, so impromptu, so messy – logistics were usually thrown together last minute, and for most of it, I felt like a pawn being moved around like a chess piece, in a daze of neverending jetlag, culture shock, language barriers, helpless and totally not in control. We had say in designing our own workshops, but that really seemed to be about it. Everyday, new, unexpected things of us would pop up, to add to the stress of designing the workshops and of living on our own in a foreign city, with no one to guide us. Finding three meals a day was struggle in and of itself, but on top of planning and teaching our workshops, we also discovered we were performing the weekend after our workshops ended, so we had to collaborate with Beijing dancers simultaneously. We also had co-curricular events to attend, which included the likes of the SLOrk (Stanford Laptop Orchestra) performance, seeing A Midsummer’s Night Dream, and attending a theater workshop, and also curricular talks, which involved readings and meetings with a wide assortment of influential, creative, and artsy individuals. While I appreciate and am in awe of the two-person team manpower driving our entire program forward, I also wish we could have more of a say in the planning of things. For one, as dancers, it does not really benefit us to see plays, musical events, or art museums – while arts collaborations are a different story, most artists are passionate about just their one art form, and it is hard to attempt to stretch ourselves to such broad lengths when the interest is simply not there. This is also a fault of us perhaps being the wrong candidates for such a program, and too specialized in our trade. Secondly, while all the speakers had much to offer, there was never any time to do any readings, and also I would rather be learning about what exactly constitutes arts entrepreneurship – a broad term with many avenues – and what I can do with it, rather than hearing a series of rather disjointed figures talking about themselves, most of which also did not relate to my interests. So what was I learning? In a program built for “experiential learning”, how much of a contribution does it make if the participants do not partake in its construction? Creativity is not a process one can simply demand and get instant results from, so dragging us through events when our basic, foundational needs are struggling to be met (housing and food, detailed planning) hinders any kind of possible “arts entrepreneurship” exploration of our own that we could be doing. These projects, like the collaboration with Beijing dancers, were not ours, in the artistic sense, so much as they were just tasks we were given and rushed to complete. Perhaps given more time, the plans laid out for us would make more sense and could be better carried out, but to do all this in a span of two weeks, without much orientation, was unfounded ambition. I left Beijing feeling more exhausted and confused about our mission, and deprived of the meaningful takeaways I so hopefully yearned for when I left for China. This was not enlightenment. This was sleep deprivation.
As the second half of our SITAC trip looms with the end of the month quickly approaching, it’s safe to say there is both doubt and anxiety felt on our end with the prospect of returning to Beijing from IDEAS camp in Qinhuangdao, where we have spent the past week. We will be teaching another series of workshops back in Beijing for younger, rural migrant children, some of which are emotionally withdrawn and some with autism. While I am excited again to be developing a new set of workshops tailored for these kids, and love the service aspect which better aligns with helping achieve social change, there is the ever-present fear of being extremely unqualified to do this. This is worsened by the fact that we will likely again face the same logistical and extraneous burdens we faced our first two weeks, leaving us more stressed, less able to be fully prepared, and makes the fruits of our labor taste bittersweet.
