University of California Berkeley - Blue and Gold Yearbook (Berkeley, CA)

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SL: Things worked out personally tor nie really well, though its true that a career in the arts is not exactly what Asian parents hope their children fall into. They want that security. My parents, luckily, were always purveyors of the arts. They still, even now, go to the Cantonese opera, and they ' re my best fans. They come see ever thing that I do. So I got lucky in that respect, and 1 think the reason that they and 1 hope I ' m not putting words into their mouth — I think that the reason why they ' re more accepting of what I do is because I work at UC Berkeley also. (Laughs.) I make a good living. A teaching salary is not big, it ' s really not a doctor ' s or lawyer ' s salary. However, the clout of being able to say that I teach at UC Berkeley carries weight, so I think with those two things, they ' re pretty happy with my decision. I ' m fortunate that way. My students who have pressure at home often ask, How did you do that? What We talked about my inspirations for a project that dealt with Asian American issues with a woman-based focus. She was interested, so we made a duet, anil iIkmi we brought in Hileeii Kim. who is the aciniinisirative assistant for Chancellor Mitchell. That ' s her day job, hernot-so-secret life. (Laughs.) fhis is her secret life, dancing with me. Eileen is actually a couple years older than I am. We brought in others, and now we have a nucleus group of seven, as well as two musicians that compose all of our music. Rice Women was our first project under |the name] Facing East Dance and Music. Before that, it was just Sue Li-Iue showing some work. As we went out more and I started to develop more pieces, people started to ask, What shall we call you? What shall we print in the program? 1 realized that I had to have something to call the group. ' We are funded primarily by passionl ' do 1 say to my parents when 1 say 1 want a life in the arts? It ' s not necessarily dance, you know, it ' s graphic design, or painting, or music. It ' s very difficult, because it ' s so individual. You have to work that out yourself. It ' s something that I think as a young adult you need to ask is Do I really want this path, or am I doing this to follow what my parents believe my path should be? Sometimes it works out. and sometimes it doesn ' t, and that ' s the individual part, and that ' s the soul-searching part. CI I: Let ' s talk about your group, Facing Hast. SL: In Facing East, my current group, we always say on our programs that we are funded primarily by passion, and that is very true. It ' s not a lot of money. It ' s a lot of time, a lot of effort and worrying, but it ' s always really worth it because the passion is there. My group is a group of women that have taken the same path that I ' ve taken. In other words, we ' ve all gone to dance school, taken lots of classes, trained extensively, toured or danced for companies and we know what it ' s like to be bound to a very tight schedule where they basically own you. We ' re over that hump. Now we work a regular real job — I probably shouldn ' t say real job. (Laughs.) We ' re working in traditional jobs, making our day jobs, and our spare time we devote to our projects. CM: How did you begin your company. Facing East! SL: I started one dancer at a time. I met Vivian Dai, who was a former UC student, one of my students, and we re-met in a dance class. We were taking the same dance class, and we started talking. She had matured — I ' m at least ten years her senior — and we realized we had a lot of thesame vision. She was tired of trying to make it in dance, yet she really wanted to work on projects that were iniiresiing to her. CH: How did you come up with the name Facing Easfi SL: Facing East was the original name of the first duet that Vivian and I did. It ' s a name that has multiple layers of meaning. For me, it means a time in my life where I respected, maybe for the first time, my Chinese heritage. Of course, I ' ve always been Chinese, but I ' ve also always been American. I was born and raised here. My parents are from China, so 1 literally am first generation, and I became extremely Americanized. 1 speak broken Chinese — 1 understand quite a bit, actually, of Cantonese and Mandarin — but I don ' t speak fluently at all. So, for me, Facing East means looking at my past, looking at China, the roots, and being able to bridge that here, so that geography does not become a barrier between being Chinese and not being Chinese. 1 don ' t feel like 1 have to be in China to feel like I ' m Chinese. There ' s a balance to be had as an Asian and as an American. I know the term Asian-American is thrown out a lot. 1 actually feel like I ' m Asian and American, or Chinese and American, instead of the hyphenated term because 1 feel like I can be both, and that ' s what Rice Women is about. Rice Women deals with more than just Asian American issues, it is accessible because it also deals with mother-daughter issues. Asian Americans read ;c Joy I tick Cliih and said, Yes! Yes! Yes! because it spoke to them on a certain c v . but the book is so popular because it ' s also about mother-tlaughter issues that allowed others to read il and also experience the same recognition. 1 w anted Rice Women to have the same kind of impact. CH: What are some of the pros and consof teaching at Berkeley? What do you hope your students take away from your classes? SL: The pros would be being able to refine my teaching skills, my interi)ersonal ii ' lalion skills, and ni inovcnient ()c ' al)ulai . It

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if the last to leave the studio, gathering Hlm rmisic and saying good- )ye to her students. There is a grace and fluidity to Sue ' s gestures hat reveal her profession. For the past thirteen years, Sue has taught dance at UC Berkeley ind worked as a professional dancer on the side. Facing East Dance md Music, Sue ' s fledgling dance and production company, presented ts first show in November of 1999, the acclaimed Rice Women. I thia Houng: We ' ll start with the basics. How did you start dancing? Sue Li-luc: Like every little girl, nn mother put me in ballet class .vhen 1 was sL . I don ' t think she knew how it would blossom in idulthood, but just like every little girl, I took classes in a small dance itudio. I grew up in San Mateo, on the Peninsula, and I took tap and aallet from first grade all the way through high school. After that, I ivent to UCLA and majored in modern dance. After UCLA, I came back to northern California and went to Mills College (a private women ' s college) and got my master of fine arts, also in modern dance, with an emphasis on choreography and pedagogy (teaching). So, at that point, I prett ' much realized that I wanted to spend most of my life in dance. 1 invested all of this time and money. 1 got two degrees in dance, so I thought, I ' ve got to make it somehow worth it. (Laughter) I ended up finding a job in dance, I was fortunate enough to teach here, and I ' ve been here for 13 years teaching modem and jazz and ballet and stretching and tap and choreography, pretty much ever thing in Western dance, or as much as I can handle. I have a family, I have a husband and two children. I ' m trying to work for balance in my life, and I know all too well that dance and a life in the arts, they ' re a hard life. It ' s hard, next to impossible, to have a relationship, let alone children you have to take care of, when you ' re out touring around and being part of a large company. 1 realized that that particular lifestyle was not really what I wanted to do. I got married pretty early, I got married right out of graduate school. Being able to have a family right away and being able to find this job at UC Berkeley gave me a sense of stability. CH: Did you tour with companies, work as a professional dancer? SL: I did small things. I have to say I never explored a true professional dancer ' s lifestyle. I never made the trip to New York, the Mecca of dance, and tried to seek my fortune in dance, tried to get into a big company. I ' ve always been a little bit too practical for my own good, in a way. It ' s working out great now, but at the time, I was wondering if this was the right choice, really, because in the prime of my dancing career, I decided to settle down. I ' ve been teaching, getting a family, getting what I thought was my career in order. Simultaneously, through all these years in graduate school and through the last ten years, I ' ve been what ' s called a pick-up dancer, which involves dancing in independent projects with local Features choreographers and local small modern dance companies. I danced with June Watanabe ' s dance company. That was one of my first experiences with a truly Asian American dance company. After that, I danced with a company called Dance Brigade, which was a very left wing, feminist, politically based dance group based in Oakland. Then, I worked with various choreographers, picking up on projects, because that ' s what my time allowed. If I teach here all day, and I have children at night, I only have time for one project at a time, because I can ' t go anywhere. So that ' s the way it ' s been for the last ten years. CH: Has it been a tough balancing act? SL: It is a tough balancing act. It ' s expensive to live here and once you dig that hole — once you buy a house, buy a car you have to keep up those payments, so this job has really been wonderful in the sense that it ' s kept me in dance. 1 felt like I was financially more free to dance for free or for very little money. It was just a different route. CH: How did you end up choosing dance as your medium? SL: You know, it ' s very interesting. I think that when I first started taking dance classes, my mother and my teachers seemed to think I had some tendency towards being good at this thing. Like most youths who are in the process of growing up, in my junior high and high school rebellious years, I really wanted to stop dancing, because developing my social life was more important to me. My mother kept me in class because she felt it was important. I had devoted a certain amount of time to it, and she insisted that I continue. I worked through that process and during the middle and end of high school, I started to truly love dance for myself. Up to the middle of high school, it was something that I was used to doing because my mother took me. She drove me and made sure I never skipped class, but it wasn ' t until I matured that I realized that this was a very special thing. As you know, as a college student you start looking for that special thing that ' s going to be your path. In college, I had very little guidance, all that I really knew was that I wanted to get my multiple degrees. That good Chinese upbringing that I had emphasized education ' s importance. At the same time, what I felt like I was good at was all of the softer subjects, it was art and dance and writing and French and psychology and sociology and all the non hard sciences that could actually get you a good paying job. (Laughter.) Among all the things that I could choose from that I liked, 1 was probably best at dance, and if I wasn ' t going to make any money, at least 1 was going to be good at and enjoy what I was going to do. I ended up in dance in a sort of very backwards, illogical way. CH: Many Asian parents tend to look upon a career in the arts with some disapproval. Did you meet some of these difficulties when you chose to pursue a career in dance?

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ncludes being able to be in a studio with intelligent young bodies ind minds who are willing to experiment with me. My students iren ' t aware that I ' m experimenting, but I try many different approaches to teaching movement, and to getting into whatever a itudent needs to be able to understand liow to perform a particular |:ask. 1 often use IteachingI as an experiment ground. It ' s where I ' ll Tiake a phrase, see if I can turn that into a step. I also like keeping a lulse on what college students are thinking — ' m not that old, but I am quite a bit older than everybody that ' s here — Afhat the mentality is, Afhat do people want iiese days with iiemselves. The more I nteract with students, the nore I realize how mportant dance is to iheir education while Jiey ' re here. Being able to express themselves, to be ahysical. to move to nusic, to train musculariy heir bodies, to take dance seriously as an art form ind as a form of :ommunication, not just a Dastime, is all an mportant part of their education. I like being ible to cultivate what will je tomorrow ' s audience md tomorrow ' s arts matrons. If you ' ve done something, you can jppreciate all the difficulties and intricacies. i you ' ve taken a dance :lass and you know how lard it is to balance on jne leg, when you see somebody balance on poinie and iiold it for 10 seconds without mo ' ing, you think Wow, that ' s amazing. The jiitrained eye would not necessarily see that. The untrained eye ees the high leaps and many, many turns as impressive. The :rained eye sees the in-between steps and understands what that ' s ill about. It looks for a message and something to touch them Features within the dance. If I can impart that idea to just one person out of a class of forty, and they go out into the world and make all their money and become an arts patron, then they will be able to give back in some way. [Teaching is] a physically hard job. When I first started teaching here, I had ten two-hour dance classes a week. Right now I have thiriccn iwo-hour dance classes a week. There ' s a different kind of preparation and a different kind of energy than a lecture class. CH: Do you feel that Berkeley gives adequate support to the arts? SL: I don ' t think that UC Berkeley necessarily, in the eye of the public or the eye of the media, values the arts. 1 think that you and I both know that UC Berkeley is famous for its science, its research, its math, its law, its architecture, and it should be. But, there is another side to Berkeley, and it seems to be downplayed to a certain degree. Nevertheless, the arts are not dead. I think that ' s the important thing, that is to remember that we ' re still here, all these classes are still here, so there is some kind of support. It allows people to be an art major, a dramatic art major, a music major. I wish it were more balanced. The faculty here does a lot of creative activities. A lot of research is creative. Really good research is beyond the box, it ' s thinking outside of the box. In the arts, we think outside of the box every day and all the time. The problem is, it doesn ' t bring in the money, and the money is, in a sense, the bottom line. 1 realize now that in the arts you have to fight and struggle a bit more, because our voice is quiet. ■ Interview conducted by Cynthia Houng I