Vina Lee is principal dancer and choreographer with the Divine Performing Arts Chinese Spectacular that is presently touring in Australia. She talks with The Epoch Times Editor Shar Adams about her awakening to the inner beauty of Chinese culture through Chinese dance.
"I learned Chinese dance ages ago, but now I feel myself start to learn all over again," said Ms Lee, who is also an assistant company manager of New York based, Divine Performing Arts.
Ms Lee – a graduate of the Beijing Academy of Dance – says she learnt only technical skills in China with little freedom for creative expression.
"Beijing Dance Academy is one of the best schools in the dance world, technically... but you don't have the choice as an artist to do what you wish to do," she told The Epoch Times.
Ms Lee left China and moved to Australia in 1990, where she says she experienced the "free of the air" for the first time.
She taught at various dance schools and ran workshops for The Sydney Dance Company, but it was the newfound creative freedom that allowed her to appraise life differently and with that she started to look more closely at her native culture.
"Chinese culture, after so many years, I realised the calligraphy, the painting, the Chinese style, I never liked it before. Then I realised, with the freedom, that it is so much a rich culture.
"I realised people have to have a certain level of calmness, of compassionate heart...to appreciate it.
"If you have a very busy sort of mind, well, even myself I am thinking those are kind of boring," she said, "but those are very deep in meaning."
By way of explaining, Ms Lee referred to Chinese paintings that are traditionally flat with little perspective or attempt made to create visual depth. "They are like a flat mountain, house, person, tree and river – always the same, but there is so much within it. Once you understand it is – oh dear…we say in Chinese culture it is the divine land; it is so much connected with the natural environment."
Performing Chinese dance through Divine Performing Arts, has been a similar process of awakening she said.
Traditional Chinese performing arts are considered to have developed in the Emperors' courts. Chinese dance was part of these arts and is understood to be the basis of martial arts and gymnastics. Because Chinese history has been so vast and varied, the dance movements were broken up and spread to different regions and different domains, she explained, and it is only relatively recently that they have taken their traditional form.
"Classical trained Chinese dance has only been exposed in the last decade, but it does not mean it wasn't there. It was there; just no one put it together. It is a very rich dance language."
When she began to explore her culture further she realised the Chinese mind was very different from the Western mind. Chinese prefer to talk around an issue rather than approaching it directly. Chinese dance works in a similar circular way.
"I realised that the movement is very much like Chinese mind in its thinking.
"It [Chinese dance] is not a simple movement, punctuated points. Instead in between [you can] use 10 different speeds and different feeling to go from one point to the other and that tells different emotion."
"It's a great learning process, very unique at the same time very rich movement and also from those styles you can play so many different characters."
Ms Lee referred to one dance in the Spectacular, Ladies of the Manchu Court where the dancers, wearing unique Manchu shoes, must move gracefully and elegantly as one body.
"For dancers to control that part is very difficult, for everyone has a different character right. You have so much training from entire mind to movement, to move together to achieve that movement."
Chinese culture was difficult to explain she said: "Only when you see the show, will you gain some understanding."
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