Advertisement
Published: October 11th 2006
Much still needs to be said about Nanling. The children we worked with there impressed into our hearts and minds like gleaming lights... the spunky ones, the diligent ones, the rakish and mischievous ones. Each lesson we would arrive to the classroom early to set up and get ready, and each time we would have to hold off the crowd of boisterous young’ns clustering around the door, trying, in singles or in small groups, to sneak up the stairs to get in first before the class hour began.
The wonderful, impeccable help we had all along the way in accomplishing our many ambitious projects:
Huang Xinghai, our project coordinator and main host, he represented Nanling Eco-Tourism company and personally set up every aspect of our stay and the project. From driving with us to Shaoguan (the nearest big city) to collect art supplies (paints, posterboard, pens, notebooks, colored pencils, scissors, glue...), to throwing a rooftop birthday party for Richard’s 35th, to filming and photographing hours of classroom time and compliling a moving DVD and slide show of the six week process, Xinghai was on the ball.
Yu Ying, ‘good old Yu Ying’ with a heart of gold, who
da boyz
huang xing hai, me and mr.woo on our last day in nanling.was our first interpreter for the TWIG project when we arrived to Nanling. Originally commissioned to work for Nanling EcoTourism on an oral history of the mountain village, she took time from her project to help us begin ours, and introduced us to many families and the ‘booming grannies’ (as we came to call the lively, vivacious, healthy and hardworking older women) in the area.
Melody Yee, affectionately known to the kids as “Shao Yi Ji-Ji,” (this translates to “little leaf, our big sister” as her family name means “leaf”!) our main translator who volunteered her summer to the project, coming all the way from Guangzhou to devote her time to TWIG. Her energy and excellent English skills brought our ideas to life. Melody’s ‘people energy’ made things happen, from dance classes to the Blackeyed Peas and mandala-painting projects with the kids to a dumpling extravaganza feast with the neighborhood grannies one evening.
Elena / Liu Chunmei (“Shao Liu Ji-Ji”), our surprise volunteer interpreter whose enthusiasm for learning about nature and her passion to communicate TWIG ideas lifted many a lesson from middling to magical. Elena translated into Chinese a version of the song that I put together
it's a deal
despite the convincing smile captured here, yu ying broke under the bargaining pressure of me, when urged to stay on through the long haul of the twig project. but we love her loads anyway. for the kids, sung to the tune of “The Wheels on the Bus.” It’s called “The Roots of the Tree.”
The roots of the tree go down, down, down (stamp feet and point to the ground)
down, down, down
down, down, down.
The roots of the tree go down, down, down,
Together we grow! (bend knees and make a big circle with both arms)
The trunk of the tree grows
tall and strong. (x3 -- slap belly and then make fists that move upwards)
Together we grow!
The branches of the tree grow
all around. (x3 -- wave arms all around until you spin)
Together we grow!
The twigs on the tree grow
toward the sun. (x3 -- wiggle fingers and move them up toward the sun or toward the person next to you)
Together we grow!
The leaves on the tree make
air to breathe. (x3 -- show palms of hands and then make waving circular motions toward lungs)
Together we grow!
The fruit on the tree is
sweet to eat. (x3 -- grab a “fruit” in each hand and alternate munching out of each hand)
Together we grow!
Together we grow! (final
melotree and the twigs
leaf melotree, our number one interpreter, in her true guise: tree pose with the twiggers. verse everyone joins hands and raises them up after running to the center of the circle, forming “a big flower.”)
Elena also knew how to bust a mean move. An unforgettable one was when Rich put on a Tom Petty’s “A Higher Place” cranked up real loud before one of the lessons, to get us all pumped to move, and Elena came bounding in right in step with the beat, spinning and jamming with a huge grin on her face to beat the band. It inspired the little kids who were crowding in the doorway below to bust a move too: first one, then two, then all of them crept upstairs and got swept into the dance ~ all of us jamming together to the electric guitar in a whirl, the TWIG teachers having far too much fun to reprimand anyone for bending the rules and sneaking in early. Booty-shaking bounty.
Sandy, the daughter of the tofu-making family that lived up the hill from us and hosted us for a traditional nine-course dinner that included pig’s intestines (a local delicacy...rather sour), fried river fish, and plenty of tofu, and sweet soy milk for dessert. Sandy was
super elena
...with the power to salsa through walls and stimulate bored children with show-stopping ecological enthusiasm. fourteen this summer and among the oldest of the children we taught, but she jumped right in as an assistant for all the classes for more than two weeks, and discovered her talents as high-spirited mover.
Everyone’s energy came together on the final evening for what turned out to be a bring-down-the-house performance for the whole village of RuYang. Parents, friends and family members of the TWIG kids packed the theater, the children’s artwork, pasted on the walls, stretched around the whole perimeter of the theater space, and Huang Xinghai’s DVD and slide show featuring clips and stills from the six weeks showed at the back of the theater before and after the performance.
We began the show with a rousing call and response rhyme that we’d been using the whole summer, calling out as 135 kids yelled back at us:
Knock on the door! (clonk, clonk, clonk, with fist)
Stamp on the floor! (stomp, stomp, stomp, with feet)
Stop-- (hands stop)
Look-- (hands make binoculars on eyes)
and Listen! (cup hands around ears)
Then the Green group entered to sing and share the Hello dance:
Hello!
How are you?
I am fine-- are you
dandy sandy
our 14-year-old helper who was so good and really committed to the project. fine too?
Ni Hao!
Che fan le ma?
Che la-- hao che ji la!
This is a song we made up during the first weeks in Nanling. Ni Hao is Hello in Chinese. Che fan le ma? is the typical following question after greeting someone; it means, ‘Have you eaten?’ Che la means ‘I have eaten.’ Hao che ji la means ‘Indeed, I ate and it was very delicious!’
Next up was the Reds singing both English and Chinese versions of The Roots of the Tree, with enthusiastic foot stamping and gestures to accompany each verse. The kids stood in a semicircle to perform and for the final verse of ‘Together we grow’ everyone rushed into the center with held hands high to make a big growth spurt.
Then we had a poetry recitation by a duet of girls from the Green group, and a duet song sung by two girls from the Yellows, followed by a group of Yellows playing a contact improvisation game we created together called ‘The Treeclimbers’ where the grand finale was a duet between Malaika and Wan Bee Shia in which Wan Bee climbed up me onto my shoulders and then Rich
wan bi xia
in da house! our prize warrior-poser, the neatest and the sweetest. surreptitiously entered only to lift both of us up on his shoulders, making a three-tiered tree.
An energy-passing game was next, with a bunch of the older boys and girls from the Blue and Yellow groups, plus Malaika and Melody, forming a semi-circle and passing chi from one person to another. ‘Hey Mama’ from the Blackeyed Peas accompanied and picked up the energy getting everyone over the stage jitters and far into the groove of it, even shy kids totally busting the moves in the pumped up improvisatory moment of limelight.
The Red-B group appeared next, to perform a special acrobatic rendition of a song and dance we’d been creating, and our grand entrance was all the kids running out to jump, one at a time, on me and Rich who would spin them or swing them or toss them into the air before sending them off to their starting place.
The show finished with a big curtain call of all TWIGgers onstage and then more call and response, bringing everyone into a foot-stomping row and then starting up some more dance music to which Rich and I performed a duet that eventually brought everyone into the
soft rock
huang xing hai, caught in front of the camera for a change. dance. It was a magic, glittering, hot, sweaty, laughter-filled evening, and when Melody, Elena, Xinghai, Sandy, Sue from Vitamin Creative Space, Rich and I sat on the steps of the theater after everyone had cleared out,the quiet seemed extraordinary. Everyone had put in a stellar effort, answering nobly the call of duty to make a fantastic show. We slurped our ice creams with a deep sense of satisfaction and looked up at the sky.
The mountains all around held their mysterious characters that evening as they did all summer. The range cupped us, protecting from the encroaching world of Nike and Calvin Klein and Toyota engine parts factories all around in lower Guangdong, and the river continued to gurgle, where earlier it had raged and flooded. The crickets and night bugs burbled and bats tossed their erratic flying selves through the air. Throughout our time in Nanling the vital presence of the living land was ever-accessible. Mountains cloaking and uncloaking with mist and sunlight, gathering and booming monsoon rains, and a maverick river to match.
The saddest thing for us was to see the bags of garbage people thoughtlessly tossed into the current. Fwoop! over the edge of
the hillside and down into the river below, a big red plastic bag full. Or the sweet wrappers the kids tossed instinctively on the ground. In the village were women who came every morning through the streets with big brooms to sweep up the previous day’s litter, so for them it was a livelihood, but the river remained clogged and polluted with the countless loads of rubbish tossed into it. It was all we could do to teach the kids the perils of littering through a song and lesson about littering and hope the message went through. May the children tell their parents, and grandparents; their children and grandchildren. May Nanling be long as alive as its booming grannies.
-r & m
-------
The TWIG after-party: murals and videos and posters, oh my.
August 18th marked our final show with the TWIG summer experience for kids, but early on the morning of Saturday the 19th we were working to film for another project yet, a video of plant improvisations done by the kids, called “TWIG Dances in Nanling.” At the invitation of Xiaoqian Li, fellow PhD researcher at Dartington in arts management, Richard and I agreed to
on the scene...
m, r, sue and a little dancer too, on the day we filmed 'twig dances in nanling' by the river. make a video of the TWIG project to be screened at an art festival in Beijing in early October. We wanted to feature background information about our journey and the project in Nanling, but also to focus on the specifics of dancing and ecology within the forest setting there. Huang Xinghai and EcoNanling agreed to produce such a video featuring dances of several children inspired by some of the rarer plant species specific to Nanling, so at the beginning of August we set to work organizing the project.
I taught a series of workshops about improvising dances with plants, offered as an extracurricular option to the children already involved in the TWIG summer experience. Through the two workshops we worked on variety of movement qualities: spirals and circles, straight lines and sharp angles, loose movement and firm/turgid/rigid qualities. We also asked the children to look closely at different plants and to find a dance within the shapes and growth patterns of that organism. A pinecone, for example, might provide the score for a very tight, explosive, prickly, hard, dry dance. A fluffy, feathery fern-like potted plant made for shivery, light, tickly dances that spouted off in all directions. Richard
love bugs
caught in the act. and I chose eight children from the 30 or so who arrived, based on the dancer’s interest in studying each plant and their fearlessness in moving. We filmed all the video footage on one Saturday morning, finding plants growing beside a riverbed in the Nanling Forest Park, and making dances --solos, duets, trios-- with these creatures.
Before we left Nanling Richard and I looked over the footage and made a structure for the video, and several weeks later, Xinghai has now completed the final edit of the dvd, and sent us the photo you see here.
Along with the completed dvd, Xinghai has designed a poster of some favorite moments from the summer. The poster is on display in the village theater along with the artwork from the summer. The exhibition will be open for another month yet.
Finally, after completing the filming of the dance video, Richard and I embarked on one final project which was the completion of a mural in the village center. We wanted to make as a lasting print of the kids’ work in TWIG, so Richard chose the one drawing made that summer which exemplified the sort of unbridled energy of a kid set to drawing a potted plant. The drawing practically explodes off the page, using red, green and blue carefully and wildly to characterize the growing plant. We obtained permission from the Nanling local wildlife museum to utilize its outside wall as a mural surface and had a (rather dodgy) bamboo scaffolding erected for us to climb around on. It took two full hot and sweaty days under the August sun to complete it, R doing all the artistry and me being a trusty assistant, but we finished the painting hours before we were set to pack and leave Nanling. The child’s rendition of the spunky potted plant can be seen by all from the river bridge which connects the village.
-m
Advertisement
Tot: 0.131s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 12; qc: 46; dbt: 0.0536s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Gretchen Maust
non-member comment
Eager to see DVD
How exciting! A DVD will be available to paint a picture while we sit at your feet and hear your stories. Is anybody else in the world doing such an amazing project of growth and vitality?!? I am in awe everytime I tune in. So eager to see you. Love and hugs, Mama G