When my friend Roxanne told me about a dance performance she was going to that mixed Ballet, Hiphop, and traditional Chinese dance, I was sold. Seeing a dance performance was one of the few stragglers on my Beijing Bucket List, and this one sounded even more interesting than I had imagined. The choreographer was from France, but had worked in Africa and China as well as Europe.
Roxanne had been to a Q and A with him, where she learned that dance was only his second career. He was drawn to hip hop as an adult when he realized there was not much choreography for women. Now, he specializes in chorogrpahing for women, although there are still men in his performances.
Propelled by this new information, I once again set my naïve feminist self up for disappointment. At this point I’m not sure if it’s an American lense that made me think he would have a feminist perspective, or just my own natural tendencies. Regardless, I never would have expected for the majority and finale of the one-hour performance to involve the men using numchucks to beat, strangle, and kill the female dancers.
I’ll admit that it was visually interesting, and it did make me think. One of the creepiest parts was that many of their moves were the same or very similar to partnered ballet, with the addition of weapons and violent exaggerations.
At the last second of the performance, the men do fall down and the women take the numchucks and throw them to the ground. For me though, after more than 30 minutes of being tossed around, r the girls should have at least gotten a few punches themselves.
Favorite Performance: The first dance, where the five men wore long skirts and long feathers attached to their elbows as extensions of their arms. The movement was gorgeous and I could really see the mixture of Chinese and modern ballet, if not necessarily hip hop.
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