Tidbits of Thought: Dancing with Phoenix

We may not be as well known as YaleDancers or Rhythmic Blue, but being part of the Phoenix Dance Troupe is one of the most fun parts of my life at Yale.

Our main goal is to promote cross-cultural appreciation through dance - in our case, traditional Chinese dance. However, that doesn't mean you have to be Chinese to join! As a group, we're pretty low-key: rehearsal every Saturday for about an hour then additional rehearsals during the week for every dance, so your time committment can be as little or as much as you want. Most members come in with little to no previous experience - just ask these girls:

May ES '10, Shani SM '06 (Forestry '07), and Tanya CC '09

Once performances come around, though, we really get going. Besides our own spring show, we appear at events like the Cultural Connections talent show, the CASA cultural show, Kaleidoscope (the ISO cultural show), and at Bulldog Days. For anyone who wants to see videos, there are some from the spring show HERE, but I think you need a DivX player or something...

Emily BK '08, Zimo SY '07, and Betsy BK '09 performing a Daizu dance

Jolie's (JE '06) solo - her fan has extra silk, so it's like a ribbon too

2006 senior umbrella dance *sniff*

Another cool thing is that we're not just limited to Chinese dance - we also cover other countries with lesser-known dance traditions, like Tibet. This year we're hoping to branch out even further, creating fusion pieces like mixing hip-hop with a fan dance and setting it to Chinese pop music. One of our most popular pieces is the Mongolian bowl dance, where each person has three porcelain bowls on her head, even while spinning!

Tibetan dance

Mongolian bowl dance

As funny as it may sound, one of my favorite parts is the community service. Every fall and spring we run a dance workshop for CASPY (Chinese Adopted Siblings Program for Youth), which brings hundreds of adopted kids and their families to Yale for the day. Each kid gets a Yale student as a "Big Sib" and they go around to different culture-related activities like Origami, martial arts, and our workshop. Last fall we also performed at the Worthington Elementary School for their International Day celebration, and we might go back to do something for Chinese New Year.