Amid Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we look back our interview with The founders of Final Bow for Yellowface, who are challenging traditional depictions of Asians in ballet and opera.
You may not know Phil Chan by name, but you’ll certainly know the organization he helped found. Back in 2017, Chan and his friend Georgina Pazcoguin founded Final Bow for Yellowface. The organization created a pledge that got many famous opera houses, including the oldest ballet company in the world, the Paris Opera Ballet, to not only verbally commit themselves to diversity but also reconsider their portrayals of Asians. The organization aims to make ballet more inclusive and create a more positive and nuanced representation of Asians in the art form.
“This just started with two people and a website,” Chan says. “Not trying to cancel anybody, just saying, ‘Hey, we as an art form need to do better so we can be more inclusive.’ ”
And while Chan had been engaged in the dance community his whole life, it wasn’t until he watched The Nutcracker with his father back in 2017 that he realized ballet’s troubling Asian portrayals. When Marie and her Prince visit the Land of Sweets in the second act, they encounter characters with rice paddy hats and Fu Manchu mustaches. And it wasn’t just the costumes or the set design that fostered inaccurate and harmful stereotypes, it was the way the dancers moved as well, Chan explains. Their movements were centered around pointy fingers and were more jarring and less fluid than those of their counterparts. “For people like me, who are trying to bring their family and the Asian community into ballet, and then bring them to see this sort of stereotype version of our culture, it’s really difficult,” Chan says.
But instead of being turned off by the industry at that moment, he became impassioned to change it. Chan previously worked in arts administration and in the behind-the-scenes roles of production as a writer, producer, and choreographer. It wasn’t until he founded Final Bow that he centered his creative practice around one question: Is there a multiracial way of producing art? The first initiative Chan and Pazcoguin worked to create was the inclusion pledge. The pledge is a commitment by dance companies around the world to eliminate “outdated and offensive stereotypes of Asians (Yellowface) on our stages.” So far, signatories include the Royal Ballet in London, the Washington Ballet, and the Louisville Ballet—all of whom perform alternate versions of The Nutcracker during their winter programs.
Since its inception, Final Bow has expanded its inclusion efforts. The organization is asking all ballet companies to commit to hiring an Asian choreographer for a main stage production by 2025. To facilitate this change, Final Bow put on a showcase featuring 31 Asian choreographers for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. With this platform, the choreographers were able to highlight the unharnessed potential and talent of Asian creatives. This move to launch a choreographic incubator is the initial step in producing brand-new ballets created by entirely Asian casts and crews. The organization also does professional development, mentoring young dancers, choreographers, and artists looking to get a foot in the door. And by compiling a database of new and established talent, Final Bow is making it easier for companies to find Asian creatives.
All these initiatives are made to contribute to a greater understanding of Asians in society, not just on the stage, Chan explains. “Our work has never been about the makeup or a little bobbing and shuffling [choreography]; it’s been about how we treat Asian people outside,” he says. “How can we as a dance community do our part so that we can treat Asian people better in our society?” During our conversation, Chan referenced the anti-Asian hate crimes that increased during the pandemic and how his father has been personally affected. Since March, Chan’s father has lived in San Francisco’s Bay Area and has felt too scared to leave his house.
In addition to his work at Final Bow for Yellowface, Chan recently finished a fellowship at the New York Public Library that helps foster this understanding on an academic level. In his final thesis, he looked at a hundred different ballets that depicted Asian people—from ballet’s inception in the 15th century to its modern performances in 2020. He found that what was happening onstage reflected what was happening socially based on ideas about those people.
Alongside this thesis, Chan wrote a book, Final Bow for Yellowface: Dancing Between Intention and Impact, which chronicles his conversations with leading ballet figures and how they depict race, representation, and inclusion onstage. The book, which has been added to several college curriculums, presents the broader Chinese American history in dance, along with the author’s personal anecdotes. “The subtitle of my book is Dancing Between Intention and Impact because it’s really been our philosophy of how we approached some of these challenging conversations around race that are very triggering and are emotional for everybody,” Chan says. “Our approach in terms of advocacy is to put yourself inside a problem and say, ‘How do we change this together?’ ”
But Chan isn’t the only published author on the team. His counterpart, Pazcoguin, wrote the book Swan Dive. Pazcoguin uses her experience as the New York City Ballet’s first Asian American female soloist to take readers backstage in the world of elite ballet, sharing stories and experiences you can’t see from the orchestra seats. Like the dancer herself, the book is raw and emotional. It dives into the dancer’s previous experiences with sexual harassment, mental abuse, and racism that in the past went unrecognized. And while the book functions as a memoir, it also works as a call to action. She urges ballerinas and administrators to push ballet into the future and bring to light these practices that were previously accepted as par for the course.
Chan expands upon this idea, encouraging people in positions of power to think about anti-racism as a direction you are constantly moving in rather than the destination. For Chan, the bottom line is this: “If you want to be an anti-racist person, think about it as a little something you do every day to make the world better and move in that direction.” And that goes for Final Bow as well; everyone has a role at Final Bow if they are looking to participate, Chan says. Whether it’s donating to their initiatives, choreographing their showcases, or helping the organization network, every bit helps.
We may soon see the final bow for yellowface depictions in the ballet, but that will not be the end for Final Bow for Yellowface and its efforts for more accurate representation in the Asian community.
Images courtesy of Nina Westervelt and Erin Baiano.
