Investigating the nuances of choreography and translation, artist Cherrie Yu discusses her relationship with language, labor, intimacy, and the process of collaboration through dance. 

Dance Lawyer: How, in your opinion, do movement and translation work together? 

Cherrie Yu: Dance has a relationship to writing. The word “choreography” contains “graph” which tells a story about how when people started to conceive dance as a separate discipline, they also began to attempt to document dance with writing. And by writing here I don’t mean strictly language, but also notations or drawings—anything that attempts to fix the movement on a piece of documentation. Dance has been obsessed with writing, and writing has been obsessed with dance. Partly because it’s really impossible to notate something that moves—there is an inherent limit to this very idealistic project of notating choreography. For me the word movement can mean two things—movement can mean very generally what constitutes the choreography, so for example, the prescribed movement of a grand plié. Sometimes I also use the word movement to mean what exactly is outside of the choreography, that which cannot be notated. The writer Erin Manning calls this the “more-than” of a dance. It is sometimes not even a movement, it can be a manner, or an attitude, or the feeling that riles up before you execute the choreography, or a tick that happens in between two moves, that despite its in-betweenness, determines how you see the movement before and the movement after. See I don’t even have a uniform language to describe this second definition of movement. It escapes that. 

The Trio A Translation Project treats this question of translation and transcription in a more explicit way. In this project, I invited different people to translate the American choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s 1965 dance Trio A, documented on film as a solo in 1978. I asked each performer to choose a person that they love to watch the original dance, and transcribe the dance into a written score. I then worked with the performer to translate the written score back into a movement solo. This is an intense and exhausting process and every participant encountered different sorts of limitations and frustrations. 

DL: How has translation, verbal or cultural, affected you?

Cherrie Yu: I am a bilingual speaker. I grew up in mainland China and I started learning English in kindergarten. I remember when I was five or six, my mom was picking me up from school and I asked her if the children in China all have to take mandatory English classes, then the children in US and Europe must all have to take mandatory Chinese classes. My mom laughed at me and told me it wasn’t the case. 

DL: Where in China are you from and what dialect do you speak?

Cherrie Yu: I speak the Standard Mandarin. I was born in Xi’an and when I was three, my family moved to a small city near Shanghai. My parents both speak their own dialect that they learned in their separate families. My mom speaks Xi’an and my dad speaks Jiangxi dialect, but because I was growing up in that nuclear family structure and there was nobody else around, I was speaking Standard Manadarin.

Although I started learning English very early on, it was a shock to move to the United States and have to use English in my daily life. There is a gap between knowing something and knowing how to use something. It was a terrifying gap. It took me about a year to get used to using English on a daily basis. In a sense it is just like anything else that you get used to with practice, like a grand plié or chopping carrots with your kitchen knife. But there is a certain desperation to it because it is language, it constitutes a part of your personhood, it is like air you breath. Slowly and slowly through practice and interaction, I learned to align my mouth and my thoughts better. One huge “aha!” moment I had during this period of language acquisition and culture shock was learning how empty the English language can be. I was picking up on how Americans greeted each other. They run into each other in the hall, and they ask, “How are you?” and even before whomever finishes asking, the person questioned would answer “I’m fine, thanks and you?” I was amazed. I thought to myself, this is really easy, I can totally participate in this. I was amazed at how Americans are so willing to empty their language of actual use or meaning on such daily occurrences. I think that was when I became more confident—if something can be this empty, then I can learn how to use it, and I can also manipulate it in my own way. In other words, taking something apart and putting it back together—this then became my understanding of translation and also one of my strategies in devising movements. 

DL: (laughs) Even though I'm a native English speaker, I agree—English tends to be a very empty language because there's not a lot of in-depth ways to actually explain yourself. It feels very surface.  Do you ever find Standard Mandarin to be empty?

Cherrie Yu:  I haven't been so immersed in using [Mandarin] so I feel less attached to it now. I've lived here [in America] for so many years without having gone home and I can say I'm comfortable saying something like, “Oh, English can be so empty,” but I don't know if I can make a similar claim about Mandarin because I have now lived somewhere where I haven't been speaking Mandarin for a long period of time and it feels a little distant to me right now.

DL: Is that a sad feeling? 

Cherrie Yu: I don't think so. I think that because I grew up with [Mandarin], it's something I can get back to or maybe that's blind confidence (laughs). I have had people ask me before whether I dream in one language or the other and I've realized for the longest time I was dreaming in English and was horrified. Then I started watching more dialogue-heavy Mandarin films like Stephen Chow films that I grew up with and I started dreaming in Chinese again.

DL: Verbal language tends to subtly inform body language, even regionally. I’m wondering now, maybe because you bring up movies, if the body language of Americans versus the body language of a person from mainland China differ at all? Or even if one or both have aspects where they can be empty or fuller? 

Cherrie Yu: It has less to do with nationality. Everybody has a certain range in their body. With each individual that I worked with [for Trio A Translation Project], we got to a point where we're so frustrated with each other—I started to understand how they moved and then they started to understand how I think, and then we’d both get stuck in each other’s habits for however long before we can go on smoothly again. But whether that has to do with emptiness or fullness, I'm not sure. I think it has to do with that sort of dailiness of a person. It's not a concrete movement that they do or [a movement that] recurs, it's more how they interpret things, or how they think of movement, or how they respond to direction. Once you start to see that thinking repeat for too long, you try to get them out of it and then they start to get used to how you're asking them to get out of it. It's like a game.

DL: That sounds like coming up against a defense mechanism. You're challenging someone to break out of a habit that—and I'm just speculating—might bring them comfort and safety because that's how they always move their body. You’re asking them to break that and build a new kind of awareness.

Cherrie Yu: Yeah, yeah. With [Trio A Translation Project] this actually happened a lot while translating [the choreography] into words. Certain verbs begin to repeat and the performer gets stuck in the word directing them. So a big part of the process is getting out of that. How many different ways can you get down to the floor from standing up? 

I am in the rehearsal process with Melinda Wilson right now. She is a ballet teacher and used to dance professionally and trained with the Paris Opera Ballet when she was younger. Her translator was her accompanist. In her score, the word “squat” appears four or five times throughout. Melinda truly hates this word by now. I encourage her to explore different ways to interpret this word every time it comes up, but it is a very frustrating word for her. I think that there are different ways that our bodies were trained or molded that make you feel repelled by or antagonistic towards certain words, ideas, or even directions, so that your body doesn’t contain that impulse to explore the various pathways possible. For me as the facilitator I have to remind myself of that difficulty, or maybe just acknowledge it and let the process hold it. There is a limit to me trying out the movement to figure out the pathways. The more pressing work is to ask, how might it feel on her body? And how can I know that? How do I communicate with her knowing that I am not her, and she is not me? It is a really delicate process. Like growing orchids. You need the right amount of light and moisture, and it is slow.

DL: When creating choreography for an individual, what is your process like? What conversations do you have regarding one’s mobility, personal interests, habits, etc.?

Cherrie Yu: I started the rehearsal process with an interview with 10-12 questions. These questions ask the performers to introduce themselves, describe their history of labor, history of performance, various events that relate to their body, things that they care about etc. I try to orient the questions so that they gather information and at the same time have an ice-breaking effect. We learn to ease into each other a little bit in this process of talking, and that will help with the rehearsals to come. And I am always surprised how personal it gets very quickly, although the questions seem straightforward. For example, if I ask a performer, how do you negotiate with mistakes in your practice, I am not defining mistakes or practice in the question, so it leaves a lot of room for them to interpret different angles the question can be answered. I remember Enid Smith, a Cunningham dancer who worked with me on Trio A, talked about how having daughters changed her perception of her own body, and she learned to be more kind to herself. Or Tony Rodriguez, a former Chicago firefighter, described an apathy that he developed from seeing dead bodies or people in pain all the time. I’m amazed by all these things that come out during the interview. This information immediately helped me understand how they relate to their body and others, and they guided me to facilitate the rehearsals. 

DL: You mentioned the histories of labor that people have living within their bodies. What does that mean to you and when did you start to notice or understand that someone's labor was directly informing their body movement?

Cherrie Yu: The first and foremost experience of someone else's labor I have is my mother and that's [a relationship] I was so immersed in but it's not like I understood that labor even though I lived next to it. It wasn't something that suddenly dawned on me, it was a slow process. I lived with [her labor] and I benefited from it and it nurtured me. I understood all that, but I didn't quite have any critical language to address it or break it down until I developed my art practice.

DL: What is your earliest memory of dance/movement in your own life? How did this impact your current practice in movement/translation?

Cherrie Yu: I remember the mandatory radio calisthenics warm-up I had to do in elementary school in China. It was a set of 8 exercises that are set to 8-beat music, each exercise repeats four times, and the whole thing takes less than 10 minutes. The exercises incorporated movements to warm-up different parts of your body, like stepping in place, squatting, tilting and twisting the torso, jumping, kicking the legs forward etc. Everything is choreographed, and you repeat it every day to the same music. Now this is reminding me of something like the Cunningham warm-up (laughs). But it is not really about the movement. Nobody will tell you if your arms are not straight enough or if you are squatting deep enough. I think it had more to do with showing up and being there. Nobody was invested in the movement. We went through the motions like it was a fact, like you are eating your breakfast cereal and you have to do it and that’s it. 

Now that I think back on those radio calisthenics exercises, and my experience doing them, I think about working with non-professional dancers in my work. I remember asking Ignacio Morales, a custodian worker who worked with me on Trio A Translation Project, whether it bothers him if someone watches him while he’s doing a task at work. He said no, precisely because he has the task to do, and he can wholly absorb himself in the task, and because the task is so solid and concrete and matter of fact, it makes no difference to him if he is being watched. 

DL: What have you learned through your practice? 

Cherrie Yu: One thing I learned was that there's no impetus to resolve anything ever. It's good to leave something unanswered because like in, let's say six months when you start working on something else, you have those unanswered things to chew on. What’s leftover will bring you to a new place and you need that to continue. What else do I have to say about that? It’s like the stamina of a body of work in a sense. You can't exhaust yourself by thinking, “Oh, I failed this or that,” but rather sometimes those spaces where you feel like you've failed give you more options later on. Like looking back and looking forward at the same time.