My Farewell Tour in China: 11 Cities in 28 Days

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Between March 30 and April 26, 2023, I joined North Star Performing Arts Management on what turned out to be my farewell tour as a dancer, twenty-eight days across China. Eleven artists. Thirteen universities. Eleven cities: Beijing, Yinchuan, Chongqing, Changsha, Chengdu, Kunming, Harbin, Nanning, Guangzhou, Wuhan, and Shanghai.

Key Takeaways

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How a Ballet Career Ends, and How It Restarts

I had been working at the Canadian Red Cross as a Medical Equipment Advanced Technician on Vancouver Island since December 2022. When the opportunity to perform in China came across my desk, my Red Cross management supported the leave. I was not going to say no. I had already lost my dance career once before, in 2013, after years of training in Mexico and performing with Goh Ballet Academy in Vancouver. Depression, injuries, and life took it from me. So when this door opened a decade later, I walked through it without overthinking it.

North Star was founded by Liu Zhenyu (刘振宇), who emigrated from Hunan to Canada in 1998 and built 北美之星艺术团 into an organization that has performed on CCTV, at the Chan Centre at UBC, and at The Orpheum in Vancouver. The administrative director was Yang Liqiong (杨丽琼 / Joan Yang), a lecturer in UBC's Department of Asian Studies. Danielle Gould managed the dance team, seven dancers in total, inside an eleven-artist touring troupe. All the universities we visited were connected through 北京北方投资集团 (Beijing Beifang Investment Group), the parent investment network behind Beijing Canvard College, which served as our official sponsor.

We started in Beijing at Canvard College on April 4, where the tour was framed as the "Jiahua International Culture and Art Week", East meets West. From there we moved across the country on a route that crossed climates, dialects and altitudes in the same week.

Every stop had its own character. In Yinchuan, students lined up to welcome us with flowers and Chinese and Canadian flags. In Chongqing, we performed a fifteen-act gala in three chapters, and the university there established an Arts and Sports Center on the night of our performance, appointing all of us as artistic advisors and instructors of the centre. In Changsha, we performed at Swan College of Central South University of Forestry and Technology, the only university I have ever performed at that has a Swan in its name. In Nanning, the welcome was the most elaborate of the tour: 侗族大歌 (Dong polyphonic singing), 绣球 (embroidered ball) presentations, and a joint five-metre mural depicting Guangxi landscapes that we worked on together with the students. In Harbin, more than a thousand people watched in a single auditorium, students, faculty, and international exchange students from Italy, England, and Korea. In Wuhan, it was Liu Zhenyu's third visit to that university, and he said 让我倍感亲切, fills me with warmth. In Shanghai, the host institution organized a 百人华尔兹, a one-hundred-person waltz, as part of an International Cultural Exchange Week.

Guangzhou

At 华南农业大学珠江学院, I performed the Swan Lake pas de deux and 《九儿》 with Danielle Gould. Sara Carver did The Dying Swan solo. Allison Lang performed a neoclassical piece. Sydney and Mackenzie Carlson danced a hip-hop duet. Treyvin Kinisky did a jazz solo. The evening gala was titled 声动华珠，响彻世界, Voices Resonate Through Huazhu, Echoing Across the World, and closed with all of us performing 《我爱你，中国》 together on stage, in Mandarin, with the entire auditorium standing.

During the day in Guangzhou, Liu Zhenyu coached the university's 华珠红星合唱团 (Red Star Choir). We were invited into a tongcao painting workshop (通草画), a traditional southern Chinese art form that uses the pith of the tongcao plant as a paper substrate, and collaboratively painted 木棉花, kapok flowers, the municipal flower of Guangzhou. Later in the afternoon we tried on lion dance costumes during a 醒狮 demonstration, and the heads were heavier than they looked, the way most things are when you actually pick them up.

One of the tour's organizers told me, during one of our stops, that the total reach of the tour, live audiences plus livestreams on Douyin, Bilibili and other Chinese platforms, was approximately twenty million people. I later cited that figure in a post I wrote for the Canadian Red Cross internal network in December 2023, on the one-year anniversary of starting at the Red Cross and roughly half a year after returning from the tour.

Today I serve as an artistic advisor for Chinese universities connected through the Beifang network. That role started with this tour, and it has stayed with me since.

FAQ

Who organized the tour and what was the official sponsoring body?

The tour was organized by North Star Performing Arts Management (北美之星艺术团), founded by Liu Zhenyu in Vancouver in 1998. The official sponsoring body was Beijing Canvard College, with all participating universities connected through 北京北方投资集团 (Beijing Beifang Investment Group). Our visas were F Class, the Cultural Exchange designation.

How did a Red Cross technician end up dancing in China?

I began at the Canadian Red Cross as a Medical Equipment Advanced Technician in December 2022. The North Star opportunity arrived for a Spring 2023 tour. My Red Cross management supported the leave because the timing worked, and because the cultural-exchange framing aligned with the kind of community work the Red Cross already values. I had been a dancer long before I was a technician. The two are not as far apart as they sound.

Will you tour again as a dancer?

No. This was my farewell tour. The universities have stayed in touch, and I am working on a different kind of cross-border performance project in Mexico, partially funded by the ventures I write about in Many Little Streams Make a River. When the next project is real and dated, I will write about it here first.

What is your relationship with Chinese universities today?

I serve as an artistic advisor for Chinese universities connected through the Beifang network. That role started with this tour and has continued since.