MOVING COLLECTIVELY, SPARKING CHANGE:
Talking Dance and Community with Lenora Lee

It is undeniable the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we have been living: long days spent glued to a chair, neck sore, back aching, eyes glazed as we participate in yet another online meeting, living in seclusion from the many who had previously made up our day to day. Even with the multitude of faces we may be seeing appear on the screens before us, it can be difficult to forget the state of isolation which many of us have found ourselves living in for the past year. In these moments, despite the borders established by this virtual world, a gesture or expression can go a long way to make us feel connected. In these moments, motion can speak louder than words.

Rather than jump right into her powerpoint presentation during the Chinatown Futures panel in September 2020, Lenora Lee, founder of Lenora Lee Dance, offered for us all to join her in a short movement exercise. Through 60 seconds of guided movement, she invited the audience to follow along as she raised her hands before her, slightly cupped and facing each other, and then pushed them slowly through the air, letting them flex and contract, bringing them together and apart, pinching her fingers together, and touching her fists to her forehead, finally encouraging us to flow out of it in the manner of our choice. In the midst of the global pandemic, Lenora reached across our screens and created both a moment of personal recentering, and one of bonding between all of us participants. Lenora has spent years harnessing all that dance has to offer. In times of turbulence, dance can become a haven and offer a respite from bereavement or a means of attaining katharsis. With the power to transcend the limits of verbal communication, it can just as easily allow for personal revelation as encourage communal discoveries and push for collective action.

A native of San Francisco, who frequented Chinatown, Lenora’s own story is heavily tied to her upbringing there. Through a path which took her across the state, and then the country, her practice has been driven by the potential for dance to impart complex narratives. As a way to share, but also to reflect, she explores the use of movement to address and process individual and communal struggles, and its power to heal and spark change. Drawing on her personal experiences as well as working with members of various communities to share theirs, Lenora creates a poignant repertoire which addresses a variety of issues including war, cancer, and the immigrant experience, drawing on diverse movement traditions from all over the world to aid in their storytellings. Lenora discussed with me her path to building her own dance company, the influence of community on her work, and the importance of humility, forgiveness, and compassion. 

[Emily Chung] When and where did you start dancing? 

[Lenora Lee] When I was four years old my mother put my sister Karina and me into dance class in Chinatown, it was on Grant Avenue taught by a woman named Louise Andre. I learned ballet, tap, and jazz on Saturday afternoons. It was basically my first introduction to dance. It wasn’t rigorous, but we did a lot of shows like the San Mateo County Fair, our annual holiday program at the Holiday Inn Hotel, and a few others here and there every year. I continued to do that until I was ten. My sister was five years older than me and she got to do acrobatics as well. It was funny because here’s this woman teaching at this beautiful second story studio in Chinatown, and she taught all these little Chinese kids ballet, tap, and jazz. We wore these glittery outfits that when I look back on it were kind of on the sexy side for our young age, and we were dancing to these Jazz songs. That was the first introduction, but one of my classmates came to see the dance class one day, and she made fun of me so then I stopped dancing and didn’t pick it up again until I went to City College of San Francisco. 

My first year I took modern and improvisation and I really was fascinated by them. Partially by the style but also by the opportunities to improvise, generate phrases, and figure out how to communicate through movement — it was completely eye opening. At the same time I started studying saxophone from Francis Wong who I’ve worked with over the years. He’s been a great mentor, activist, composer, and music director and he pushed me to find my voice on the horn (I wasn’t very good with sight reading or practicing) but he really felt it was important to figure out how to communicate through sound. Those things together launched me into this whole other world based on creativity. I was somewhat of a shy kid; I didn’t take any artistic classes in high school and I never felt like I was that interested in or valued the things that a lot of other folks around me did, so once I got into this, and got reintroduced to the arts, I was fascinated with it and there was something that resonated that I couldn’t put my figure on and so I continued with it.

[EC] Along with Mr. Wong, who else do you see as having influenced the way you work and dance and how you choreograph? 

[LL] When I was at City College I took other dance classes. I was very much interested in African-Haitian, I also started taking Japanese martial arts at the time. I was interested in different cultures and forms of movement. I didn’t go into in depth studies of all of them, but I did feel various different connections to them whether that connection was to a sense of culture, tradition, spirituality, community, community expression, ritual, thinking about movement as sacred… Those things drew me to various forms. I was introduced to Capoeira at that time. I wanted to understand the different backgrounds and significance of various dance and martial arts styles, whether they are at their original states or have evolved into contemporary times, and having perspective on the breadth of that history and how the forms are applied in the current day. 

As for other influences, I grew up in different programs at Donaldina Cameron House (CH) in SF Chinatown through my family’s upbringing. My parents went there as well, and CH has a lot of youth group programs pairing youth with adult mentors. They were tied to the Presbyterian Church in Chinatown, so I not only went through their youth group programs but I also became a leader at various different points. And I think growing up in Chinatown helped me understand culturally the value of community and the value of family and extended family: knowing that through these programs we can achieve a much broader vision together and that there’s a power and a strength in us working together to accomplish a larger goal, whether thats a goal or a vision of how you would like things to be, how you would like people to interact, how you would like society to be on a whole. Those were very influential years when I look back on them now. When I take a look at people who I know as adults and get a sense of their upbringing, I really feel that I benefited from that as a youth and it’s shaped the way I direct the dance company and work with artists now. For example, if I hadn’t gone through those programs, I don’t think I would have the skills to run a company in terms of collaborating with a large group of people and knowing how to work together. 

[EC] What led you to build your own company? 

[LL] After three years at City College I transferred and started at UCLA as a Biochemistry major. When I got down there I tried taking organic chemistry for the second time and it was like a foreign language, I couldn’t understand it, and I really liked the dance department. I was torn because I felt so much more enriched by the dance department faculty and courses, and so I talked to my parents and they said, “Well, we just want you to be happy so make the decision that you feel is best for you.” I pretty much went into tears and that was the point when I made the decision. From there on out it was very straightforward, I didn’t doubt my decisions about going into the arts. That initial support from my parents enabled me to change my major and figure things out as I went. Science didn’t make sense to me in my mind or in my heart. My path was a natural progression after I made the decision to switch. 

I had some really great teachers [at UCLA]. Victoria Marks had just finished teaching at London Contemporary Dance and had come back to the U.S. She lived in NY and ran a company there for a while. She pushed in her own work and in us the value of bringing our own experiences into our work and not being afraid of having our work focus on people, individuals, communities. She paints incredible portraits of individuals and communities and that’s what she encouraged in us. I think that was quite new for many of us at that age. A lot of the people in the dance program were cheerleaders and song girls. That was their background, competition dancing, so for some of them it was a really challenging shift and she pushed us hard to come up with content and try to deepen our views and perspectives, deepen our own views of what dance could do and how it can be utilized as a voice rather than just movement on a body. So that’s where the inspiration came from, and basically since then I’ve been working interdisciplinarily with musicians, visual artists, poets, writers, multimedia designers, and filmmakers. Victoria pushed us to experiment and that was very exciting. She and other faculty also brought in a lot of guest artists, like all the international and national artists who were on tour and performing at UCLA. One of my jobs was to usher at live performances, so I got to see a lot of the visiting companies and that was very educational. 

After that, I came back to San Francisco for six years and I worked with Francis and other musicians. I met a Taiko artist—Melody Takata, who runs a Taiko school in San Francisco Japantown—I studied with her for a couple of years. I formed a group with a Cuban-Brazilian percussionist Jimmy Biala and we did Carnavals, and then I made my own work and danced in a few ensembles. I moved to NY for four years but worked at a labor union for two and a half of them, and it was very difficult to create work while having a full time job. So I quit my job and collaborated with Elaine Wang building work together. We did a full length show at a Brooklyn art gallery. She moved back to LA and the following year I moved back to SF. We took our piece on tour to LA and San Francisco, but our collaboration didn't work out because we ended up in different cities. I ended up forming “Lenora Lee Dance” and have been directing it for the last thirteen years. 

One of my interests that has evolved over the years is my research into genealogy and my grandparents’ immigration to the US. I went to China for a year and that was quite inspirational. I did a solo performance art piece about my mother and her three sisters and how they viewed their mother, and then I did further genealogical research. Our first large scale content based piece in 2010 was called “Passages: For Lee Ping To,” it was based on my maternal grandparents’ immigration to the U.S. and how they were separated for ten years, not knowing if they would ever see each other again. We also built a gallery installation at the Chinese Historical society based off of that piece, a multimedia work. That was the first project that truly gave me a glimpse of how this artistic work could represent so much more. It blew our minds open because we were talking about immigration of Chinese, but really this story was not only about the Chinese. Chinese immigration in itself is a large topic, because there were hundreds of thousands of Chinese that came over during the Chinese Exclusion Era (1882 - 1943, with restrictions until 1965) who basically had devised an underground way to come over and could not claim their real identities, affecting all the generations that came after. But it also was about immigration generally, in the broader sense, and how anti-immigrant sentiment has been around in the history of this country and various other countries. It’s about how we look at the immigrant, both their accomplishments and with the racially unjust lens. And that piece propelled me into seeing what was possible. 

At that point I went head in, full on, into the work because I could see the potential but I wanted to understand what my capacity was in being able to share these stories and uncover different experiences, being able to share things through dance and performance that people wouldn’t normally feel comfortable sharing verbally with others due to their immigration statuses. From my grandmother's generation they would never talk about their experiences. For one, they didn’t want to be deported, and also, they needed to let go of traumatic events in order to move forward. However, then you get all these generations for whom the stories are lost.

[EC] Do you either consider yourself as an activist, or the work that you do as activism?

[LL] It was interesting because in 2011 after Passages, I created a work called Reflections and that was based on three generations of my father’s side of the family. It was loosely inspired by my paternal grandfather, my father, and my brother who passed away, and took a look at the different challenges that Chinese / Chinese-American men have faced in assimilating into American culture. My friend Raymond Fong who was in the project, is an activist and martial artist, and I studied Enshin Karate from him. He has trained in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Martial arts, and has a Ph.D. and two masters degrees. He said to me, “Everything that you do is political, just getting on that stage is a political statement.” I hadn’t ever thought about it that way, maybe because I grew up in very community based programs in Chinatown and the people I was immediately around weren't necessarily focusing their energies in activist circles. 

I was creating work that I felt was compelling, revealing these different narratives of the communities that I spent so much time in growing up, and it became about the advocacy in certain ways but as it was happening I didn’t look at it that way, it’s just a part of you and your work, and you don’t really label all the parts of yourself. I just knew that it was meaningful for me to be able to share these stories, and everytime I put them on stage I was always blown away because a lot of my audience in the early years was our community and I think they appreciated the fact that we put those stories out there. They may not do it themselves but I think they appreciated us being able to share the narratives in that way. I like to share the perspective of—not the grit—but the strength and the courage. 

In 2017, we mounted a huge piece on Angel Island and that was the second major eye opener for us. We brought in different male dancers for that project. Johnny Nguyen and Hien Huynh are Vietnamese American, both have backgrounds in breakdancing and hip hop. I had done auditions before for male modern/contemporary dancers and didn’t have a good response so I opened it up this time to Asian male dancers of different dance backgrounds and they came in. It was really incredible working with them because their training was different, in certain ways more grounded. There wasn’t this sense of hierarchy that comes with ballet, contemporary, or modern dance training. The styles they trained in are rooted in community. 

[EC] I always love ciphers at the end of any hip hop class, it’s something that I wish we had in other forms of dance, and I hope we start to integrate it. It’s such a powerful moment where you’ve through this class together and you’re all sweaty, you’re worked through fifty to ninety minutes of this rigorous, intense work where you’re all following a choreographer, and it’s time for the cipher and it’s your time to shine and everyone else is cheering everybody else on and it creates this really strong bond. I haven’t experienced that in classical training at all.

[LL] Yes, it’s exciting because so many other forms are based in improvisation. When it comes down to it, it’s about how you can communicate through the movement: you have to figure out what your voice is and that’s really what it’s about, how you put the vocabulary together, and how you make your sentences and what statements you want to say. I think that’s the beauty in watching people improvise; we get to celebrate each person as an individual and we get to see who they are. When you let them go for it then you get to see the beauty in it, you get to see the magic happen, and I think that’s what it is with these different artists that I have the opportunity to work with. Usually I work with them because I feel that they have a strong individual voice. 

We can have a strong collective voice, but their individual personalities need to come out as well and I think that’s one of the things I try to tap into in picking different artists and working with them in developing together. I’m more interested in taking a look at what your strengths are and amping them up: How can I help you blossom? How do we allow the magic to unfold for each individual but also collectively? And given that I am from the Chinese culture but have grown up in a very individualistic American society, I feel like I can see from both perspectives; I understand how to navigate through both sides and see the strength in each, trying to put that in the work. I think that’s where I see myself as a director, how I’m able to do these large projects with large casts for many years by myself, so it’s because I can understand both the eastern and western perspectives. With that, I think I can accomplish certain things that other artists may not be able to if they don’t have a strong sense of the value of community.

[EC] To what extent do you draw from your dancers’ own styles and choreography or improvisation when you put together a final piece?

[LL] We start from the beginning. Usually for each project I’ll choreograph a certain amount, but for every rehearsal I have [the dancers] choreograph individual material, duets, and group material. So by the end, all the vocabulary is from all of us. I pick material that I and other people created and then I have everybody or some people learn it. Then I videotape everything and as I’m putting the narrative structure together, I’ll say, “Okay, Hien’s phrase number five will go here.” I make post-it notes for each dance phrase and rearrange them, deciding which material looks best in what order, who looks best doing what material, and I figure out the structure of the piece out that way. 

[EC] I saw on your website that you do certain workshops: How often do you work with inexperienced dancers and do community projects?

[LL] I’ll do presentations in university classes, and those can be in Asian-American studies, they can be in dance, theater, creative writing, music, sometimes it’s women’s studies… I’ve also done presentations, workshops, and master classes at conferences, with dancers or people with no technical dance training, and modify structure as needed. For example, if people have no experience in dance I’ll have them do interactive movement exercises together and generate simple phrases either based on their experiences or whatever movement they like. Oftentimes, I’ll give them writing exercises and ask them to write about happenings in their lives, give them a couple of options, and they'll either share through speaking or they can generate their movement based on their stories. Then we’ll do some role playing exercises, and sometimes I’ll integrate all of that and I’ll say, “Okay, Jan can you read your story top to bottom three times, and Derek can you just read the line that’s the essence of the story twice or whisper it somewhere, or repeat a word, while other people are doing their movement.” I’ll set up a fake stage and put people in different configurations and we’ll just experiment mixing up the content they generated, so it becomes a collage. And it’s exciting! A lot of it is about trying things on the fly, and I’ve learned to trust my sense of intuition more and more over the years. It’s an exciting process to do and to be alive in the moment with that. 

[EC] How do you engage with hope in your life and work, where do you see hope?

[LL]  I think hope has to ring true in everything. Even in the darkest experiences. I try to integrate a level of hope throughout the shows. We do writing exercises as part of our creative process in rehearsal. Sometimes I’ll dig in and we’ll deal with really heavy content / material / themes. Last time we did a piece on cancer and it was pretty intense. I’ve been struggling with that, I think, trying to figure out what healing looks like. Over the last few years, I myself have been wanting to be happier and I’ve done a lot of work and research on challenging and heavy topics, I don’t necessarily want to leave people in that place. So I think it’s important to find certain harmonies internally—strength, compassion, hope, forgiveness, love—and to allow them to permeate not only through your body, but in your life.

Like for example, a few months ago, I made a conscious decision to not get so entrenched in all the political upheaval that was going on in this country during the pandemic. I was watching a lot of news and getting very frustrated and sad about the state of our country and the state of our society. I decided, “I can’t hold this internally in my body anymore,” and if I choose to not hold the anger, and frustration, and the desire to learn about everything that’s happening currently, that doesn’t mean that I don’t care. I had to be fine with that because I knew that there had to be another way around it, to look at it and to live; that if we permeate compassion and love, generosity, strength, acceptance, I feel like that energy and vibration can ripple into other parts of our lives. We are all connected in different ways. 

I studied meditation for twelve years and that’s been a huge influence on the way that I look at life, knowing that we’re all connected, that we can affect one another, that we have impact on one another, not only as humans, animals, living things, but our planet, life in general, having respect for where you live, the things that you own, respect for others, that we cannot go on thinking we are entitled to certain luxuries, privileges, and hierarchies in our lives, entitled to money, jobs, recognition, entitled to status. If we had a perspective of humility, and we looked at people and experiences as fresh and not to be taken for granted, then we can actually do much better and affect each other in much more positive ways. That’s something I've been grappling with, and because I’ve had time off the last three months not doing projects, I've been able to listen to myself more and find internal strength physically. But I’ve also been reevaluating: “What kind of a grounding do I want to hold and how can I be that steady center for my family too?” 

I have family members who deal with cancer, and artistic collaborators who are trying to survive during the pandemic, and people who are dealing with a lot of life and job instability. It’s put on hold the way that I look at performance but now it’s also been about: How do we want to look at our lives? How do we want to see impact and change occur? How can we be part of a movement in a way that doesn’t continually reinforce barriers, distance and difference? Not that it isn’t justified in many different realms, but I’m just thinking in general, how we can create individual change and spark change that is magnetic and influential, that is going to bring beauty, and light, and compassion, as opposed to calling out in negativity. Both are valid and various different forms are necessary, but for myself, I’m trying to figure out, “How do I see my efforts best utilized?” And that’s what I’ve been thinking about lately. I know that it’s different for everyone. 

To learn more about about Lenora Lee Dance, visit: www.lenoraleedance.com