Beyond the Dance

by Chan Hon Goh

  As for my father, I didn’t realize that his own emotions had choked all the words in his throat. He had not meant to upset his only beloved daughter. How could he not have noticed how serious I was? In truth, he had watched me and had seen some of my shortcomings – my turnout, my flexibility. He had observed that I could not raise my leg as high as my mother had been able to in her dancing years, all the way to her nose. But now he spoke. “All right,” he said “If you really want to be a dancer then I will work with you. I will watch you and correct you. Everything I can, I will do. From now on, I will take care of you.”

  My father was true to his word. Even now, after training with many world-class dance teachers and guest performing under so many artistic directors at different companies, I have not found a teacher quite as nurturing as he was. And not just for me, but for all his students. In fact, it always seemed to me that my parents treated each one of their students as their own child, whose future was important to them. And the key to their approach was encouragement. Yes, Father could be strict, but he believed that encouragement and stimulation would get better results. So he would patiently demonstrate a step or combination over and over, and his combinations – standard steps put together – were always rhythmical and interesting. They would help to train a young dancer’s mind as well as her body.

  I was glad to get equal attention from my father, and to be considered a serious student at last. As for my father, he really did begin to consider whether I might have the talent for a career. Perhaps it was hard to judge his own child and what he needed was the opinion of someone else; if so, he soon got it, although unbeknownst to me. My father read in the Vancouver newspaper that the legendary Anton Dolin was in town. A dancer for the great Diaghilev in the 1920s, Dolin had later become founder and artistic director of London’s Festival Ballet. Dolin had wanted my father to join his company when he was a teenager studying in London, but Father had gone to China to study with the Russians instead. Now my father rushed to the hotel where Dolin was staying and found his old mentor with white hair and using a cane for support. The two had an emotional reunion, Dolin asking my father what had happened to him, and my father recounting his decades in China. Then my father, always looking for opportunities for his students, asked Dolin if he would come and teach a class at the academy.

  Dolin came to class, but he was old and frail, and asked my father to teach the class while he watched. Or perhaps he just wanted to see how good a teacher my father was. And so he sat and observed our Professional class, and we girls were excited to have this great ballet figure in the studio with us. After class, Dolin called my father aside. He pointed to one of the students. “That one,” he said. “She has it. Yes, she is going to be a beautiful dancer.”

  My father tried to see which girl he was pointing at. Dolin seemed to be pointing at me, but my father thought he must be mistaken – there were girls in class who were better. To make sure, he called me over. I did not know what they had been speaking about, so when my father said, “You are talking about her?” I didn’t understand what he meant.

  “Yes,” said Anton Dolin.

  “She is my daughter,” said my father.

  “Ah, you see?” His old mentor smiled.

  My father sent me back to my friends. He did not tell me then what Anton Dolin had said, worrying that his words would make me too sure of myself. But he took them in.

  Practicing: the desire to improve and the pursuit of perfection.

  My mother, Lin Yee, who had good practical skills, was the principal of the academy, while my father held the title of artistic director of the Goh Ballet Company And it was the company that provided the immediate inspiration for us young dancers as we watched the adults rehearse and perform. Its members were professionals between full-time jobs, or who had recently retired but still wanted to do some dancing, and good amateurs. They were paid only what little could be spared from the ticket sales. My father, however, had hopes that the company would grow, believing that Vancouver deserved a classical company. But it wasn’t because of my father that I was cast in my first leading role, in a ballet called The Butterfly Lovers. It was because of a new acquaintance of the academy named Ling Tsui.

  A caring, generous, and sophisticated woman, Mrs. Tsui was Chinese but had spent many years living and studying in Paris. She had enrolled her young daughter in the Goh Ballet Academy and took private classes herself, a rarity because of the expense. Later, Mrs. Tsui would become my godmother, and her independence, determination, and cultural refinement would become an example for me. It was she who had acquired for the Goh Ballet the chance to perform The Butterfly Lovers at a fundraising event for the Lions Club of Vancouver at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. And it was she who convinced my father that I be cast as the female lead, telling him that I was clearly the most outstanding young dancer in the school.

  So it was because of Mrs. Tsui that my first real public performance had me in a leading role at the age of thirteen. Not only my first performance, but my first pas de deux – and with a male dancer who I had a terrible crush on!

  Incredibly captivating, Che Chun was many years my senior and the leading dancer of the Goh Ballet. My father had been one of his teachers back in China, and Che had gone on to become a principal with the Central Ballet, dancing not only the major Revolutionary roles that my father had once performed in, but also in Swan Lake, Don Quixote, and Coppélia once the Chinese government had begun to allow them again. Wanting to broaden his horizons, he had come to Canada the year after my mother and I had, eventually becoming vice-principal of the Goh Academy, where he taught while dancing in the company. He even lived in our house for a time. I had known him since I was a little girl, but now I had started becoming interested in boys, and Che had a wonderful personality. I didn’t socialize much at school and, since I looked up to professional dancers, perhaps it was inevitable that I would develop a crush on him. It wasn’t that boys my own age didn’t interest me, but none of them was involved in my dance world, where I spent almost all my time.

  The Butterfly Lovers is a famous Chinese story, in which two young people, deeply in love but unable to marry, find eternal happiness when their spirits are transformed into butterflies. My father decided to choreograph a duet using a combination of Western ballet movements and traditional Chinese dance, with the woman dancer in soft shoes rather than pointe. Not having done any partnering, this was an enormous and also frightening learning experience for me. During rehearsals, Che would lift me into the air and I would scream, afraid of being dropped. He would tell me to hold myself solidly, and I tried, but he said I felt as wobbly as Jell-o. Each rehearsal was exhausting, since he was the experienced one and all the corrections were on me. Quickly I forgot about my crush; this was about the hard work of dancing and nothing else. I was very fortunate to have such an accomplished dancer as my first partner. We could skip the usual tedious exercises and move right into the choreography, with Che guiding me on every step. Much later, as a professional dancer, I would sometimes be partnered with young, hesitant male dancers who made me feel less than sure that they would catch me on the way down.

  The Queen Elizabeth Theatre is very large; it was the house where the major ballet companies played in Vancouver while on tour. Our performance went well and received warm applause, and I felt that I was no longer terrified of being lifted or of giving my trust to a good partner. Che was happy too, and we took our bows and smiled at one another. The gift Che gave me before the show – a swan-shaped mirror – hangs now in my living room, and I especially remember the card that accompanied it, which said, “May this be a grand jeté to a brilliant career.”

  At Mrs. Tsui’s backyard pool party, Che lifted me to the top of the world.

  Grade eight and high school were a relief to me. Having been around adults so much as an only child, I welcomed the more mature atmosphere. And my marks were now putting me on the honor roll, an accomplishment that brought me tremendous satisfaction. I had ente
red one of the happiest periods of my life, which seemed as if it would continue forever.

  Now that I was serious about dance and my parents were behind me, my mother decided we should all go to New York. She had gone once with a former student and was so inspired by the dance atmosphere created by the studios, teachers, and great ballet companies that she thought I would benefit from the experience. And so she took out a loan and the three of us, along with Che and another student, went for almost two weeks. We stayed in the Chinatown apartment of a friend’s friend, bunking down in sleeping bags. During the day my parents took me to open classes, sometimes four a day – the first time I had instruction from teachers who were not members of my family. At night we went to see the American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet. We saw Baryshnikov dance in Don Quixote one night and then Fernando Bujones dance the same role the next. I saw Suzanne Farrell dance in Balanchine’s exquisite Mozartiana (I could not have known that one day Suzanne would teach me the same role). And for the second time I met my uncle Choo San.

  Choo San, my father’s younger brother, was the fourth child in the family to enter dance, after my father and my two aunts. He had been discouraged by his parents – weren’t three children in dance enough? – and had gone to university to study biochemistry before starting his career in Europe. Emigrating to the United States, Uncle Choo San had become an acclaimed choreographer and associate director of the Washington Ballet. He had recently created a piece for Baryshnikov at the American Ballet Theatre and so he took us to an ABT rehearsal. We went through the stage door of the famed Metropolitan Opera House and walked into the green room where my uncle introduced us all to the great Baryshnikov himself. I will never forget the dancer’s piercing blue eyes as he shook my hand. Then we had the thrilling experience of watching Fernando Bujones and Cynthia Gregory rehearse Giselle. Could a fourteen-year-old girl who dreamed of becoming a dancer be more fortunate? I did not think so.

  But the trip was also memorable for another and less positive reason. It also revealed that I was susceptible to one of the serious dangers facing dancers. At about the age of thirteen, I had found myself starting to look heavy. Indeed, my body was going through natural changes due to puberty, and as a result I was growing larger and a little rounder. This was not the image of the perfect, slim dancer that I had in my head from all the professional ballerinas I had seen in performance, on video, and in pictures. And compared to the younger girls at school I was beginning to look – at least in my own eyes – unattractively big. So before the trip to New York I secretly began to diet. Since I knew nothing about nutrition, I simply counted calories, throwing away the lunches my grandmother prepared for me, or slyly spitting out mouthfuls of food into napkins. Instead, I would eat only a single chocolate bar, or a muffin, or some candies – sweets that my body seemed to crave as I grew hungrier.

  With Amy Ruth (another dance student) and my charismatic Uncle Choo San inside the Metropolitan Opera House – my very first time in New York.

  The diet worked; I did lose pounds, and people began to remark how thin I looked, comments which I took as a compliment whether they were meant that way or not. Despite being busy at the school, my mother noticed and urged me to eat more, but she often wasn’t around to make sure. Secretly, I applauded myself for slimming down to a “proper” ballerina look, and even credited my improvements as a dancer to it. But I was unaware that I was starving my body of the fuel and nutrition it needed, not only to dance, but to survive. Only later would I realize that I was at the beginning stage of anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder that afflicts many dancers – as well as other young people – and can result in serious illness, hospitalization, and even death.

  In New York, I had been running around from morning to night, taking one class after another. One day during the trip, after I had taken two classes, we were talking about going somewhere to eat. All of a sudden I didn’t feel well. I couldn’t even speak, but managed only to put my arms around my father just as I fainted.

  In a way, my fainting was a blessing, as it alerted my parents to the serious problem I was developing. After that, they were careful to ensure I ate healthy foods in proper amounts, and quickly I regained my strength. I was lucky; some people find it far more difficult or even impossible to break free from anorexic behavior, and later as a professional I would sometimes spot other dancers who were clearly suffering from the illness.

  As Princess Aurora in Sleeping Beauty, with Aleksandar Antonijevic. (The first time I danced a solo from this role, it was for the Prix de Lausanne competition.)

  CHAPTER 6

  THE PRIX

  It was great to have my parents’ support and guidance, and the exposure to dance that they were now trying to provide for me. It was another thing to have full confidence in myself Like every young dancer, I knew my own weaknesses only too well. And watching a real ballerina like Natalia Makarova, I saw just how enormous a chasm separated me from her. Of course I was young, but it was hard to believe that these dancers weren’t always great. And what of the hardship and stress of being a dancer – the grueling work day after day, the fear before going on stage before thousands of people? Could I possibly be up to all that? Before long I would encounter my first real test, almost without realizing it.

  Every time he was on Main Street on the way to the studios, my father would look at a building, an old, ornate bank building at the corner of Main and 8th Avenue. It had been broken up into offices but, with its windows and high ceilings and impressive exterior, he imagined it would make a perfect landmark home for the Goh Ballet Academy. And then one day a For Sale sign appeared in one of the windows. After much consultation and working out of finances, my parents, together with a new partner, Willy Tsao (artistic director of the City Contemporary Dance Company in Hong Kong) managed to buy the building.

  It took six months to renovate the interior into four beautiful studios, one with a small spectator’s gallery, as well as offices, change rooms, and showers. By 1985 the Academy had moved into its first-class facility, raising Vancouver’s level of what a professional school should offer its students in training and facilities. My parents and Che worked tirelessly to run the classes as well as the Goh Ballet Company.

  And it was exciting for me to feel a part of it. Wanting more time in the studio, I decided to take grades ten and eleven by correspondence, an option the school board allowed for those with high marks. That way I could do my work in the early morning and evening, and free up the whole day for dancing.

  My father saw that I and the other advanced girls in the class could not further our dance technique without male partners. The highlight of so many great ballets are the duets, or pas de deux, between the principal male and female dancers, and partnering takes a great deal of practice and experience. So he began a program to bring male dance students from China, giving them full scholarships to train at the Academy for several weeks at a time and act as our partners. These boys were two or three years older than we were, and already had some partner training, which was a real help. That my father could bring them over showed the marked policy change of the Chinese government from the days when we had left. In his first year in Canada, my father had not been allowed to speak to members of the Shanghai Ballet who had come to Vancouver on tour, an experience that had left him deeply hurt. But now the Chinese were encouraging exchanges with the West.

  Dance might have become the center of my dreaming and waking life, but I was certainly not the only girl smitten with dance in the province of British Columbia. There were the other girls in my father’s Professional program, as well as the many more at other dance studios, and I was by no means recognized as the one who was going to make it. At the local festivals and competitions, if I placed at all it was second more often than first. Although at fifteen I made it to the provincial championship, I didn’t win (one of my mother’s other students did). But I was never discouraged, for I didn’t go into any competition expecting to win. Instead, I wa
s glad for a chance to prepare and then have the experience of being on stage and dancing under pressure. And because I hardly ever won the local prizes, it certainly didn’t occur to me to enter a major international competition.

  Age 14, at the Lincoln Center in New York.

  In Vancouver, Aunt Soo Nee was working with a young male dancer from Singapore named Kelly Teo. Kelly had come to Vancouver so that my aunt could help him prepare for the Prix de Lausanne competition in Switzerland. Perhaps the most prestigious competition for young dancers, the purpose of the Prix de Lausanne is to identify the dance stars of the future. The judges look beyond polish and current level of accomplishment to see the talent in a young dancer, the potential for greatness. And it rewards these dancers – there are a dozen or so finalists – by bestowing scholarships to the best ballet schools in North America and Europe.

  Not long before, my mother had taken me to England to take some classes at the Royal Academy of Dance and we had watched another important event, the Adeline Genée Competition. I had learned a lot just watching the dancers and so, when Kelly was filling out his application for the Prix, I said to my father, “Maybe we should go and watch. It could be a great experience.”

  “Yes,” my father said, “You’re right.”

  “If you’re thinking of going anyway,” Kelly said, looking up from the form, “you might as well fill out an application and compete. Why just be a bystander?”

  The idea dismayed me. “But I’m not ready,” I said. “I don’t even have any pieces prepared.” I knew from watching Kelly that entrants were not only judged while taking class, but had to perform both a contemporary piece and a classical variation, or solo. And those who made it into the finals needed costumes for their solos, which were performed on stage before an audience.