Tale of 2 Cultures for Choreographers

Choreographers Nancy Lee and Melinda Ring both use cross-cultural influences in their dances to arrive at spiritual truths that they say they can attain in no other way.

“In the balance between traditional Chinese dancing and raucous, athletic modern dance, I have actually developed my relationship to God,” Lee says.

Works by the locally based Lee and Ring will be seen during the four-night “Twisted Spring” music and dance series at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) opening tonight through May 21. (Dances by Sarah Elgart and Lula Washington complete the programs).

As a Chinese-American, Lee says she walks a precarious tightrope between respect for ancient Chinese traditions and longing for American-style independence.

Every time she makes one of her feisty, gymnastic modern dances, she says, movement becomes “a process to help me to communicate with the two very different parts of my identity that I will never abandon, but which often tear me apart.”

“Dance,” she says, “has to be a path leading towards painful dialogue with the self and society and God, and my family.”

Lee’s piece on the May 19-21 “Twisted Spring” programs is a character-based dance exploring this dialogue. “At times it’s really traumatic holding on to my past,” she admits. “I went to Chinese--American school until I was 18. (Because of cultural regimentation), I never went out on a date or even saw my girlfriends after school. I was very, very polite. It’s not exactly a sweet legacy.

“But oddly enough,” she adds, “sometimes the memory of burning ‘hell-money’ at my grandpa’s grave has given me the courage to create. I am in the process of reclaiming my past rituals to find out what they mean to me as an adult. And that inspires me.”

Lee recalls that her non-English speaking parents interpreted her dance apprenticeship with Nina Weiner in ’86 and Doug Varone in ’87 as a stinging “slap in the face” to their desire to see her marry into a good family and to work in a lucrative profession.

But their objections were dispelled during a recent performance at Barnsdall Art Park in which Lee combined the Buddhist dances she learned as a child with expressive modern dance.

Lee recalls that, after the performance, she and her parents broke down and “finally made peace with each other,” a process she readily admits “may mean more to me as an ethnic person than to most Americans.”

“Because I couldn’t communicate with my parents in an intimate way with words,” she says, “dance became the only way for me to show them--and I suppose me--that I was serious about the privileged life they had given me when they fled China” in 1950. “The dance spoke to them in an intimate way that language, with all its barriers, could never do.”

But Lee’s piece, “From Grace,” also incorporates non-American and non-Chinese influences. “Irish culture had the attraction for me that Chinese culture might have for a Westerner,” Lee explains.

“It was exotic, ethnic. And because I’m dealing with heavy questions in this piece--how one finds God in this life and how one knows the ‘self’--borrowing from that mysterious and ritualistic culture to challenge my body and mind made sense.”

Choreographer Melinda Ring also says she felt that she had to experiment with “different cultural forms” if she was to grow as an artist.

Ring, who is a former dancer with the Rudy Perez Performance Ensemble, decided to study Butoh dance-theater in Japan last year.

She says she wanted to throw herself into a “completely foreign and mysterious environment to relearn everything all over again as an artist: why you breathe a certain way when you move a certain way,” and “why a person would bother making a dance in the first place,” she explains.

“It was almost like a rebirthing process being there,” she recalls, reminiscing about her arrival at the farm/collective where Butoh master Min Tanaka challenged her to “communicate your deepest feelings with each movement.”

However, she says that her piece, “Chosen Subject,” (May 12-14) delves more into the spiritual underpinnings of Butoh than its weighty, intense movement style.

For Ring, performing a dance is “the equivalent of knowing yourself,” and she sees no separation between her desire to be a “responsible, activated, political citizen of the world” and “making a dance.”

“I found that Japanese dancers face a lot of the same problems we face here in L.A.,” she says. “There’s little government support and basically most Japanese don’t understand why anyone would want to make a modern dance, let alone go to see one.”

But Ring quickly admits that Tanaka’s students do something that she’s never seen take place in the United States: “(They) communicate the secrets of their inner lives without having to say a word.”

When Ring returned from Japan a few months ago, she says she felt a “renewed and inspiring resourcefulness to make dances all the time.”

“There aren’t a lot of places to dance in L.A.,” she says, “so I decided to make dances in the street--anything to show myself and the people around me how therapeutic it is to see and do a dance.

“We have forgotten something important about dancing,” she muses. “It’s the connection to something more powerful than just ourselves.

“Sometimes you really have to defy everything you’ve ever learned as a human being to dance a single step with any integrity, or any hint of experimentation.”