The Musical Innertube - Volume 2, Number 190 - Jennifer Lin, Phil Chan and an About Face in Ballet

JOHN 
Today we welcome back to the musical Inner Tube, a friend of the podcast, Jennifer Lynn, filmmaker, author, and also when she was at the Philadelphia Inquirer with me, a very accomplished correspondent and reporter, Jennifer has written two books, Shanghai Faithful Betrayal and Forgiveness in a Chinese Christian Family in twenty seventeen and Beethoven in Beijing Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra's Historic Journey to China in twenty twenty two. She's here today to talk about her latest documentary, titled ABOUT FACE now making the film festival rounds and a beautiful piece of filmmaking. It is Jennifer. I want everybody to watch it. It is so beautiful. 

Phil Chan is with Georgina Pazcoguin, the central figure in About Face, among many other things. He is a dancer, choreographer, educator and author. He is co-founder with Gina of Final Bout for yellowface, an organization committed to changing the way people of Asian origins are represented in the arts, specifically in dance, and he is president of Gold Standard Arts Foundation, which champions Asian voices in dance. Phil is the author of Final Bow for Yellowface Dancing Between Intention and Impact of twenty twenty and Banishing Orientalism Dancing Between Exotic and Familiar twenty twenty three. He's currently a visiting professor at Harvard University. Welcome, Lin and Chan. Jennifer and Phil. 
JENNIFER
Hello, John. Hello, Don, and thanks for having me back on the on the podcast. 
PHIL
Nice to be here. 
JOHN
Uh, Jennifer, you know, in previous podcasts, we've talked about this movie. It's been underway for a long time. Yes. Would you like to give us a capsule summary of how it finally got over the finish line and how it's out there now? It's so wonderful to see it. And we only saw little bits of it as we went along. And now it's a thing. But can you give us an idea of what you have to go through to get a movie finished? 
JENNIFER
Well, uh, movie making is not a fast business. So this project has been, what, Phil, five years, four years in the making. And really, um, it's because my daughter, Cory Stieg gave me Phil's book Final Bow for yellowface, that this whole project became a film four years later. So, um, think back to the summer of twenty twenty and all of the turmoil in this country. Think back to the Atlanta spa murders, where, uh, Asian women were were killed and the rise in anti-Asian hate. Uh, and that was kind of the backdrop when Cory gave me Phil's book, which talked about Asian representation in ballet. And so I'm a ballet nerd. I've loved ballet since I was a little girl. My mother was a ballet snob. She used to take us up to New York City from Philadelphia to see the New York City Ballet, because it had to be the best. And so, you know, I grew up with ballet, but there was something that every time we would go to see The Nutcracker, there was something that always kind of bothered me about the Chinese dance, because my dad is Chinese and I don't know, as a kid I couldn't really articulate it. So then Corey gives me Phil's book Final Bow for yellowface, and it was like, aha! He is speaking to me and it's, you know, I'll let Phil explain more about his book. But it was Phil kind of put into words what I was feeling, but wasn't quite able to articulate and why. Watching certain ballets kind of made me feel, you know. And so The Nutcracker was one of them. And, uh, I was fishing around for another, uh, documentary project. I had just finished, Beethoven in Beijing, about the Philadelphia Orchestra. And so Corey and I, we were like, you know, this would make a great film. So we called up Phil and Gina. They signed on. We started the interview process, and then everything came to a screeching halt. John and Don, you may recall when I was doing research at the New York Public Library on Phil's suggestion, looking at like records of the nineteen fifty four premiere of Balanchine's Nutcracker. And I saw these photographs of a young Chinese dancer by the name of George Lee, who danced once for the New York City Ballet and then never again. And I became obsessed with finding him. I found him. We did a documentary about him called Ten Times Better, but that meant putting the Phil and Gina project aside, which we only resumed last year, and now it is finished. It's making the film festival circuit, and hopefully next year sometime it'll be on public TV. So that's kind of the thumbnail background, but it was really because of Phil's book coming out at a time when it did. That really made me think, you know what? This is a topic that we need to explore now. 
DON
Phil, um, first of all, do you hate George Lee for putting a huge hold on your movie? And second, no, go ahead. 
PHIL
I, um, I had the pleasure of meeting George Lee, uh, before he passed, over zoom. Um, and in my own research, you know, I'm a Nutcracker ologist. Um, having worked on so many productions of The Nutcracker all over the world. So, um, as part of my fellowship at the New York Public Library in twenty twenty, I came across photos of George and sort of had always wondered what happened to him. Where was this Asian person? And, um, you know, as we were changing the very dance he premiered, where where did he go? And so lucky Jennifer was able to find him. Um, I don't know. Chinese people come. We have a very strong filial piety, um, that is hammered into us from our Confucius background. So the fact that I could make way for an elder to have his story told, especially since his story had gone so many years untold and was just, um, he was a pioneer in so many ways that, uh, I was just thrilled that he was alive and we could get his story, um, captured forever. So, um, absolutely no hard feelings. Jennifer. And, uh, and and I think just just what a service Jennifer did to the dance world to make sure that George finally had his day in the sun. So. 
JOHN
And let's give the film a shout out. Everybody listening to this podcast go and see that it, uh, it tells its own story. It brings us into its own world. Uh, it goes from, uh, World War two, uh, to dealing cards in, in Vegas. And, uh, it tells you an awful lot about the life of a dancer as well. 
DON
And, uh, Jennifer, that's coming up on PBS pretty soon. 
JENNIFER
Right. So right now it's available on streaming, on American Masters. But on December sixteenth, PBS is going to broadcast it nationally. Uh, and, uh, so every station in America will show it, um, which is like incredibly rewarding for me because when I called George Lee for the first time on the phone, when I finally tracked him down and I said, you know, I'm a reporter, I really want to tell your story. He said to me, why are you interested in me? I'm nobody. And so, you know, for him now to have his story told nationally on TV, it's really it's really great. And, you know, George got to enjoy a lot of the, uh, his late in life, uh, celebrity. So I think he, he he got a kick out of it. 
DON
That's great. That's terrific. Let's go back to the, uh, a Nutcracker ologist. Uh, because one of the other things that occurred to me in watching, uh, the, the film about face and your participation in it, Phil, is the fact that the Nutcracker is has been seen by almost everyone. It is the ballet that you take your kids to first thing. And if you are a young ballet, even if you're a kid that just takes ballet lessons and doesn't go any farther in the career, you're going to be in a production of The Nutcracker when you're five, six, seven, eight years old. So it is pretty universally known, and the portion of The Nutcracker that involves the Chinese dance involves many nations coming in. But the Chinese dance specifically shows what China was, how China was represented in the minds of Europeans back in the sixteenth seventeenth century, whenever this was first composed. And so it needed updating. So that's where you come in. Is that right? 
PHIL
Yeah. So, um, it really was, uh, the line for me is taking the difference between character and caricature. So thinking about, um, your favorite character in a film or a book while you're watching that movie or book? You might not have the same lived experience as that character might be a different gender, lived in a different time, has a different life experience. But while you're in that movie or in that book, you get to see the world through that character's life experience. So I will never be pregnant as a man. But if I read a character about a woman who's pregnant, and maybe the next time I'm on the subway, I'll give up my seat for the pregnant lady because I know that she's what she's carrying. So that's what what good art does is build empathy for people. And that's. And you, you do that by building rich characters. The flip side of that is a caricature. So something like a shorthand. Saturday Night Live, it's flat, it's two dimensional. It's really meant to be, um, just again, a shorthand. So sometimes caricatures are important. Punching up, uh, calling truth to power like Saturday Night Live, but can also be used to punch down, like racial caricature, blackface, um, etc.. So the question for us is when we're going to see The Nutcracker. Some of the dances have so much character in them, character dances, and then the sort of Asian ones, the Arabian, the Chinese are just sort of flattened caricatures of these cultures. And so as ballet is shifting from being just a dance for kings and queens of Europe from the sixteenth century to now being a dance form for all Americans, including white Americans who are not Europeans. Right? We're not doing ourselves any favors by pretending all white people are Europeans, right? Yes. Right. So all true. It ain't true. How do we how do we make this art form that was not made for any of us? Work for all of us. And so the way to do that is saying, okay, well, why doesn't everyone get a character when we're representing their country? That's all we're asking. And so that's where the sort of impetus of this work comes from. 
JOHN
So Gina, your co-founder and last bout tells a story of finally getting to have sort of a leading role in an, in a, in a ballet, and it is going to be an Asian character and she's supposed to be Chinese. And the first thing that they do is dress her in, uh, a, a geisha wig. And it's, it's all from from there. It's wrong. All of it's wrong. And, and and she talks about that, that feeling that she had of inner conflict, sort of even though it was, uh, it was a big moment in some ways, one felt sort of the coercive aspect even of the casting system, you know, that you're supposed to stay quiet when the room is full of white people and that you can't really even when. And I and I thought immediately when I saw that, I, I'm immediately it sort of hurt my heart because I thought, how many other dancers has it been like that? And I'm sure you have a story you could tell about that inner conflict and thinking and saying, man, should I speak out now? Should I wait? Can you tell us about. Did you have your own? I'm sure you did. 
PHIL
First, I think first moment I remember going to The Nutcracker as a young boy and sitting there with my dad, and, you know, the Chinese dance happens, and, you know, he sort of leans over to me and he looks at that and he says, is that really what you want to do with your life? Do you really want to to do this ballet thing? Because that's all they're ever going to see you as? You're never going to be the prince, you're just going to be the butt of the joke. Are you sure you want to do this? Um, and that, you know, is really sort of stuck with me in this work is how do we find a place for everybody in this art form? Um, it doesn't matter. You know what color your skin is on the inside. If you're a ballet fan, you're a ballet fan. If you gotta dance, you gotta dance. Doesn't matter. Um, and so this this work is really about how do we make this art form bigger and for more people? Um, and also, I think this work is also opening doors for people to not have to see that or say that anymore is to immediately walk into a theater and just know that you're part of the show and it's just assumed that's that's what we want everybody to have the experience for. So so that's really at the heart of our our work is to make this art form bigger and to last and survive into the twenty first century when we're competing with Netflix and professional baseball and, and, you know, Broadway and all of these other art forms, that there's still something beautiful and sublime about classical ballet that that anyone can enjoy. 
JENNIFER
Another point that you made, John, about the, um, reluctance to speak up and speak out, making an elite ballet company is about as difficult as joining the NBA. I mean, there are a lot of people who fail and try and fail. And so, you know, many dancers who we talk to, including Gina, including the head of the ballet program at Indiana University, said that, you know, as a dancer, you you don't complain because, you know, you can be replaced easily. There are so many people who want those roles that if you start complaining about the costume or the choreography, then you know you're out of here. So it's like, complain at your own risk. I think it's inherent in ballet that this inability to really speak out. 
DON
And there are there's, um, sections of the film, Jennifer, that you show where I think it was Gina might might have been one of the other dancers, but she had to perform in yellowface, uh, in, in a particular dance. She did, because that's what it called for. And there are, uh, some black dancers and ballet people. Uh, one of them said he had to perform in whiteface. Uh, so, so again, I think this is moving away from the stereotypes that were put in to the original ballet and getting closer to people living their lives now, but not losing the the technique, not losing the, the appeal of the original ballet. 
JENNIFER
Right. And one of the messages from Phil that I think really resonates, resonated with me and resonates in the film is he's not saying, let's cancel these, let's get rid of them, let's not do La Bayadere. He has, I think, very effectively advocated for just making these productions better by making them more authentic. And and I think to me as, as a filmmaker, that's what really appealed to me, uh, in terms of Phil's story and Gina's story and their advocacy. And they have been incredibly effective. So I'll let Phil, I should let you speak for yourself, but just giving you a shout out, you know, they started this movement and put up a pledge on their final bow for yellowface website. And they have gotten the, uh, you know, some of the top dancers, top artistic directors in the world to pledge to basically do better. So Phil. 
PHIL
Yeah, you know, it started out in twenty seventeen with a conversation with the then artistic director, Peter Martins of the New York City Ballet. Um, he was sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place, where on one hand, there were these these problems with the Nutcracker that he was seeing, and he was getting letters from patrons saying, hey, I'm not comfortable bringing my children to The Nutcracker. And you know, when you've you can't bring your kids to Nutcracker anymore. You've lost. You've lost them, right? So at the same time, he felt a pressure to not change. This was George Balanchine's, you know, one of his signature masterpieces. It's been performed more than any other Balanchine ballet ever in history. It's performed at six weeks of it, at least from Thanksgiving to New Year's, from, you know, half a dozen or more companies in the United States alone. Um, it's a big financial moneymaker for a lot of ballet companies to they rely on the income you make from The Nutcracker to pay for the more risky, avant garde, edgier new works. So it really isn't a culturally important piece and an economic piece to the ballet puzzle, and so you can't make changes to it willy nilly. Everything has to be calculated. The stakes are very, very high. Um, so in that meeting, we talked about the history of how Asian people have been represented in film and television and radio, which of course came from opera and theater, in ballet. So looking at old French orientalist work, but then looking at how that's come into the future, including film and TV today, video games, um, we also talked about the history of ballet itself as an art form, what cultures went into the development of this Italian Renaissance dance form that was incubated in the courts of Louis the fourteenth and Versailles, and had their adolescence in Russia, in Denmark, in England, before coming over to the United States and becoming a truly American art form. So what? What did that journey look like and what cultures contributed and what cultures maybe didn't like, you know, Chinese Arabian cultures didn't contribute in the same way that Spanish or or Polish or French culture influenced the development of ballet. So from there, um, he decided to make some subtle changes to the makeup, the choreography and the costuming. So I called Gina and I said, you know, holy Shostakovich, Gina, I think Peter Martins is going to change The Nutcracker. And if Peter is willing to do it, why not every other company in the country, especially since we're saying yes, diversity, equity, inclusion, yes. We want you to bring your non-white kids to our ballet schools and join our board and buy a subscription and come to the ballet all the time. But then, like ching ching chong, here's your heritage and culture, and sorry, we're not willing to change it because that's our history and culture of performing Chinese this way. Those two things are not congruent. That does not make sense. You cannot mean mean both of those things at the same time. So the pledge was for us a way to to get people to really have a think about this issue, to actually address this in a way that was non-confrontational. So we bought yellowface. We put up a pledge that says I love ballet, centering our love of ballet as something we would have in common with people. We want to sign the pledge practicing inclusive advocacy. So for those of you listening who want to change the world, instead of saying, hey, you need to change the world, saying, hey, we both have this problem, how can we change it together? That's going to be much more effective at changing people's minds. Um, and that's the philosophy that we adopted in this pledge. And so at this point, every major American ballet company has signed our pledge. A lot of the big European companies, um, have signed as well and are having this conversation, uh, the Paris Opera, which is the West's oldest performing arts organization, um, founded by Louis the fourteenth, released their first diversity report a couple years ago that cited our work by name as a contributing factor to their decision to no longer do blackface or yellowface on the ballet or the opera stages. So, again, going back to this idea that art builds empathy for people with different experiences than you. This has had a beautiful unintended consequence of not just saying, how do we see Asian people better, but how do we see each other better? How do we portray each other? How do we tell each other stories that doesn't feel like appropriation, but that has integrity because we really need to see each other better in this moment with what is happening in the world right now. The antidote is the arts. The antidote is empathy. That's what we need more of. 
JOHN
You know, I was very impressed by the little clip that you gave of Misty Copeland. Uh, because, uh, for our our listeners and viewers in twenty nineteen, she basically took up, uh, a bit of a crusade with the Bolshoi Ballet over its refusal to stop blackface in, in its productions. And, um, as, as mentioned elsewhere in the, in your film, Um, there's there's there's pushback from, uh, ballet companies of other nations who don't have our traditions, who don't understand what the fuss is about, because they ain't here and they don't understand and so forth and so on. And one of the things that Misty says in that little clip on, in your your film is she's saying, you know, we're not succumbing to, you know, the urge to cancel or something like that. You know, we're not we're not going, uh, because I think cancel culture for very good reasons. Sometimes, um, is, is, uh, is seen as is too extreme that there's a, you know, sort of a vengefulness about it, but that's not what you're about. It really is. 
PHIL
If we were if we were canceling people, I would say, don't do The Nutcracker. I would say, you should cancel The Nutcracker. And that's not what I'm saying. I recognize that The Nutcracker is a financial moneymaker that allows us to commission new works by people of color, by women choreographers, by under, under traditionally underrepresented voices. The Nutcracker is part of that equation. You cannot throw that out. What I'm not asking you to not do Nutcracker. I'm asking you to do a better nutcracker. That's it. It's in the service of making better art. Um, and I also think about change. You know, some people, some activists demand instant change. And if you think about ballet as a semi truck, it is it is going very fast as as most large organizations are with that history. It's heavy. It's got this tradition, this weight of tradition that it's carrying. So what happens when you turn a semi truck that is very heavy and you turn change directions very quickly? The whole thing flips over, right? So to make change, you need to steer a little bit slowly, a little to the left, a little to the left, a little to the right, a little to the right right. That's how you change directions for something moving quickly with a lot of weight of history. And so some people have felt like this change hasn't happened quick enough. Um, but look at where we are eight years later. I mean, we can really say that we have all of the a major American companies have signed on to this movement and are actively opening doors for Asian people. The flip side of this argument of the same, or the other side of the same coin, is where the Asian creatives telling their own stories. Jennifer Lin, an Asian documentary telling our own story. Right. It's so important for us to tell our own stories. And after the aftermath of the shooting in Atlanta that Jennifer mentioned that killed eight people, including six women of Asian heritage, all of the ballet companies around reached out to me and Gina, and they said, what can we do? How can we support the Asian community? Do we post a yellow square? Like what? What do we do? And and it just felt like in that moment we were seeing so many of these Nutcracker Teas, these orientalist productions, these like this tradition, this heritage of doing these canonical pieces from Europe, depicting Asian people that have nothing to do with Asia, no Asian creatives. Right. So we're doing La Bayadere, a ballet that takes place in India. But we've never hired an Asian choreographer. But we do Bayadere. Corsaire. Miraculous Mandarin. Nutcracker. Bugaku. Year after year after year. And have still never hired an Asian person. So in that moment I said hire an Asian. That's what you can do. Hire an Asian. And they said, well, gosh, we don't know any. No one's on our radar. No one's good enough. No one's a good fit. Do you know any Asian choreographers? And that, to me, was just such a cop out. Um, so this was March of twenty twenty two. By May of twenty twenty two. Six weeks later, Jean and I launched our first ten thousand dreams virtual choreographic festival. We said, you can't find one Asian choreographer. I'll give you thirty one. And every single day during the month of May, we showcased a different Asian American choreographer from that festival. We made matches with five companies. Four of them happened to be women. So four or five Asian choreographers, including four women, got commissions from that first festival. And then it was from that those commissions we then brought to the Kennedy Center. So closing about face is this really beautiful moment where you get to see Gina showing her own choreography at the Kennedy Center in a festival of Asian choreography, where nine Asian choreographers are on the same program. That literally has never happened in history, not even in Asia. In twenty nineteen, when we first started doing this work, only two Asian choreographers got five commissions professionally in the United States. New commissions. Four of them went to Ed Liang and one of them went to Kylie Kwan. So in all of the United States, five new works were made by Asians. In twenty twenty four, after we started pushing twenty twenty four, that number went up to thirty four new works by Asian choreographers, right? So that's literally like minimum effort, just me and Gina and like the right connections, the right emails. A little blood, sweat and tears, like getting people in the right direction has really shifted this entire landscape of whose voices are heard. And what do Asian people look like on our stages. And let me tell you, it's not yellowface anymore. It is dancers from Asia, Asian American dancers, dancing, works by Asian choreographers, dancing works by Asian American choreographers. And it's normal. It's just as good, if not better, than everything else you'd see on a ballet season. And it's just normal now. And that's what the push is for. Excellent. 
JENNIFER
One of the choreographers that Phil mentioned, Kali Kwan, she used to dance here in Philadelphia with ballet X, she was one of their dancers and contemporary companies like ballet X, um, some of the strong regional companies like Ballet West in Salt Lake City, they've really been at the forefront of promoting, uh, dancers of color, choreographers of color. So although we're spotlighting this problem in the ballet world, there is progress. Oh, sure. 
PHIL
Um, particularly, yeah, I do have to say, on the note of Kylie Kwan, Kylie Kwan is one of my favorite choreographers working today. I used to say that I hated sharing a program with Kylie, because then everyone would compare our work and they'd see how much better she is than me. But now I say, I love sharing a program with Kylie because it means people will actually buy tickets to see the work, so I. But but another company to to really highlight is Oakland Ballet. Um, and the resident choreographer there in the aftermath of the sort of Covid anti-Asian madness, uh, they started the Dancing Moons Festival, which is the first festival dedicated to AAPI choreography in the United States by a ballet company, um, and has done it every single year since then. So presenting Asian American Choreography, um, year after year. A lot of other companies have been doing that since Ballet West did a Asian Voices program last year. Um, and so it's, it's starting to pick up some steam. And that's where we're seeing a lot of this new representation. So shout out to Graham Lustig, who's the artistic director of Oakland Ballet for for that leadership. 
DON
Jennifer, I didn't mean to give away any of your filmmaking secrets. But it did occur to me that, uh, in About Face, one of the very first shots in it is Phil looking over his phone and getting all of the negative. Yeah, texts and reading them and going, boy, boy, that comes very quick in the film. A couple of minutes in, but then you use the rest of the film showing how things open up and how the different companies adapt to changing the Chinese dance and then changing that over to cowboys, which Phil was a stroke of genius. Uh, yeah. And, and, uh, and and opening things up. So I think that's an interesting part of the film is to show how tight things are. So I want to ask you and Phil now are the same sort of people that were rejecting it at the beginning of that film. Are they a little more open to things now after, uh, after things have unfurled the way they do in the film? 
JENNIFER
Well, we hope they will be. We will see. Um, but, you know, Don, over the years, when people ask me, well, what are you working on? And I would explain to them the premise of the film, um, sometimes people would be like, yes, I'm glad you're doing this. Sometimes people would be, huh? I don't see a problem. I don't have a problem. And sometimes people would be outright hostile and, you know, particular nephew. But anyway, uh, and say things like, well, you know, this is the way it is, and this is the way it's always been, so why change it? So I'm totally prepared, um, to to face some pushback to the film. Um, we live in a time when the issue of diversity is, uh, you know, there there are some who want to quash all discussion of diversity, equity and inclusion. And so what I love about Phil and Gina and their whole approach is it? It's very much like, let's talk about it, let's think about it. So my hope is that at the end of the film, maybe those people who said at the outset, if you don't like it, don't go might say, aha, okay, now I see what you mean. So I think people will come to the film with different expectations. There are some people who are so excited we've gone viral on TikTok. I mean, which is kind of amazing to see. But obviously there are a lot of people on TikTok who are anxious to see the film. And then there are a lot of people who are like, you know, uh, this is wokeness run amok. Yes. Uh, and so I'm prepared for, for everything. I, I love the sequence, the scene in the film in Scotland where, um, the head of the Scottish Ballet, who is someone Phil has dealt with, um, they decided to rework their Nutcracker. And this is, you know, this is Scotland that we're talking about. Not not the United States. And for the very same reasons. And they hired a Chinese choreographer to rework that 90s of choreography. And, uh, in the press, they got a lot of applause. And at the same time, they got a lot of ridicule. Uh, Russia Today in particular took took offense with their decision to rework The Nutcracker. So yeah, I'm, I'm... 
PHIL
Although to be fair, the reporter from the from Russia Today who did that was then arrested for being a Russian plant. So. Yes. Um, I just, I just have enemies everywhere, don't I? Yeah, yeah. 
JENNIFER
So, I mean, uh, those, those, uh, texts that comments that Phil reads in the beginning of the, of the film, those are real. So, uh, yeah, it's it's, um, basically it's a DEI subject that we're talking about here, and, uh, I do think there are still people in our world who want to have a discussion about it. 
JOHN
Yeah, definitely. I'm wondering, uh, Jennifer, you as a filmmaker, uh, you know, your toddler is out there, and I'm just wondering what your how how are your feelings as, as the movie goes out into the world after all the work you've done? I mean, uh, I mean, I live close to a filmmaker, as you know, and, uh, we've sweated through, uh, three or four of her movies, and there's always another one coming up. Yeah. Yeah. What are your feelings right now about how it's going, how people are taking it? 
JENNIFER
I'm very excited. I mean, we we're we're in the festival run now. We have some that are coming up that we can't talk about but will be very exciting. Um, and, uh, you know, eventually we'll be on public TV. So you feel so, so anxious and hopeful for your toddler as it makes its way into the world. But but yeah, I mean, I'm I'm looking forward to it. We have, um, screenings coming up in Philadelphia at the Asian Film Festival on November sixteenth. The Three Rivers Festival in Pittsburgh, as well as Vancouver, which is nice. Uh, the Vancouver Asian Film Festival this Sunday, coming up in State College. You know, so it's it's a real cross-section. Uh, and many more to come. Uh, so follow us on social media so you can keep tabs, uh, of when about face will be screening. 
JOHN
Which reminds me, you know, and I want to give a shout out to the live arts, uh, watching star on the rise, which was, uh, which was a, uh, a piece that Phil worked very hard on, a reimagining of La Bayadere. And, um, I thought to myself, boy, I wish I thought two things. One, I wish I could be in the theater because I really believe in live theater of all sorts. There's something about it that being live theater, nothing else can really replicate. To be live with a bunch of other people in a room where something is happening that is special and never the same twice. Um, there's nothing like it. But I also thought, Phil, wouldn't it be great if I could bring my seven or eight year old to see this? She has no knowledge of the struggles over representation when she sees this ballet. This will be what it is for her. This will be the starting point. I'm sure you've thought about just one or just one version. 
PHIL
I mean, that's the beauty of it. Exactly. Exactly. With. With the Wizard of Oz. You know, nobody can top Judy Garland singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow. It is. It is iconic. It is a moment and it is past. I would just be sacrilegious if somebody else were to try and remake The Wizard of Oz. But what's lovely about Swan Lake or The Nutcracker, La Bayadere is like, even if you went to see the show last night and you come back tonight, It's a different cast. Or someone was a little tired last night and today they're really on and it's just a different show. It's someone dropped, dropped a prop. Someone fell over. That's life. That's that's live performance. And so every show is inherently different. So if that's true and we've always been changing shows since the dawn of time, since the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare, we've always changed the shows, fiddled with them between the shows. So we've always done it this way. Why can't we just get rid of a little yellowface? If we're going to change it anyway? 
DON
I mentioned earlier that changing, uh, La Bayere to cowboys was an incredible stroke of genius. I thought, because in watching the originals, uh, which were. Yeah, kind of, you know, loincloth men jumping around pounding on drums, which was their idea of what India was like, even though people had gone to India and come back to England and France and had an idea of what life was really like there. Um, the idea of changing it into cowboys and into a story of a woman trying to make it in Hollywood is, uh, it shifts the, the, the vision away from what looked kind of ugly into something that is, you know, I mean, okay, it could be right up there with Oklahoma, you know what I'm saying? 
PHIL
Right. Absolutely. Yeah. 
JENNIFER
Um, Phil, uh, premiered A Star on the Rise at Indiana University in March of twenty four, and I was we were there filming, and there was one special performance where they filled the theater with fifth graders. Phil, were they fifth grade or third grade? 
PHIL
Yeah. Oh, yeah. You know, just like, like three thousand fifth graders sitting there screaming their heads off, clapping wild, wild. They went wild, I think, before their teachers had said, this is the ballet. You have to be polite. You have to sit in your seat. You cannot scream or clap and cheer. And I went out there and said, does anybody want to see some dancing cowboys? And of course, all that went out there just screaming their heads off. And it was so great that like, how can you get this art form that Louis the Fourteenth did in France in the sixteen hundreds? And here we have a whole bunch of fifth graders just screaming for like, it's the most exciting thing in the world. I mean, that's magic. Absolutely. 
JOHN
Um, well, listen, thanks so much, Jennifer Lin and Phil Chan. Uh, the movie we're talking about is ABOUT FACE, and we've been talking about a lot of our forms, many of which appear in ABOUT FACE very much recommended. Uh, it's now doing the film festival round, and, uh, and I know what that's like, because I'm doing it myself as a filmmaker, dad. Yeah. You know, and but I know what it's like. And and hats off to you both for having made just a gorgeous piece of documentary filmmaking together. 
JENNIFER
Well, thank you very much for having us on. 
PHIL
Thank you guys.