A journey in dance

Richard Chen See, a contemporary and ballet dancer, expresses the challenges that came his way through a series of postcards

November 16, 2018 01:40 am | Updated 01:40 am IST

Visionary virtuoso: Richard Chen See and Annmaria Mazzini in Paul Taylor Dance Company

Visionary virtuoso: Richard Chen See and Annmaria Mazzini in Paul Taylor Dance Company

The stage is dark; the digital screen is the only lighted backdrop ready to beam; the speaker, a silhouette is heard than seen. He greets us in chaste English and proceeds to take us on his life’s aka three decade-old dance journey through the most exotic memoirs. This is Richard Chen See, a Chinese-Jamaican, American contemporary and ballet dancer, instructor, choreographer now in India on Full Bright-Nehru Grant (2018)! Sounds a wee bit confusing?

It gets clearer as we travel along with him through the PPT (not power but picture point presentation). And this he does, reading out a series of postcards (letters) written by him to persons that mattered most in his life, say his maternal grand-mother who was the only one in the family to have identified his talent for dance and encouraged him in her own sweet way. Richard reads out his own letter to her written from Kingston on his arrival to learn the Afro-Caribbean dance. In his words, he narrated to us with the voice of a young Jamaican boy, “she was half-Chinese but she could understand English though she knew nothing of the language. From her, I learnt that communication was not about talking but understanding.”

To a question on his parents’ reaction to his decision to learn dance, Richard admits, that his parents were like many other parents not really keen on his pursuing dance as a vocation. So he had to set good academics record as well if he wished to learn dance. To him, movement through dance was like creating a language, very challenging and equally appealing.

He moves over to another letter written to one of his mentors at the Royal Ballet School, England where he went to learn on a scholarship. Interspersing the letters spelt out with day, month and year of writing plus a picture of the person to whom it was addressed by him, Richard played out clippings from innumerable ballets on in which he worked or rather danced beginning from the first ‘Anansi’ (the monkey) the content of which was Asian and hence closer to a version of Hanuman. It was a pleasure to see the versatile dancer who seemed to glide with his feet hardly touching the ground – something of a boneless wonder!

He goes on to 1982 when he signed a nine-month contract with a ballet company in the US. “I was finally a green-card holder. I got to work in a musical. The enticement for me was that I could get free classes. I was raised as a Roman Catholic. Putting steps into a musical context was learning experience to me. I found mental refuge in ballet.”

In his letter dated 1987 to Christopher Gable his coach and mentor in England, Richard mentions that he is about to leave dance field. He wasn’t obviously happy doing only techniques of ballet as the American theatre needed at that time. Like Gable, he loved to explore the dance for its dramatic capacity to create mood, character, story and emotions without resorting to words per se. Much later in 2008, he writes again to Christopher in San Francisco that “your idiosyncrasies were emulative; you left values which I took up later. I did your roles and your sister was very pleased with my performance in Paul Taylor’s dance company.”

Emerging art form

The letters go on in this manner interestingly unveiling Richard the dancer and the changes he, at times willingly and at times by force of circumstances, adopted and absorbed, not to mention his impressive dancing clippings in many a ballet. “My life was like a rolling stone,” he says in a letter penned in 1992. He observed that the modern dance in America was emerging art form. And the stress in content shifted from myths and stories to contemporary issues. Like for instance in Oakland dance company, he learnt that the latest issue was about men and childcare not the traditional marital values of couples took centre-stage in their dances. ‘Cakewalk’ was a ballet where characters were not drawn from mythology. German expressionistic art had influenced American modern dance.

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