Interview: Daniel Ezralow

Pearl (www.PearlTheShow.com), a new American-Chinese dance-theatre spectacular, inspired by the life of Pearl S. Buck, the first woman to win both the Nobel and the Pulitzer Prizes, will have its world premiere at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center for 4 performances only, August 27-30th. The story, focusing on the substantial influence Pearl had on both Chinese and Western cultures, will be brought to life through new choreography by Daniel Ezralow (Ezralow Dance Company, MOMIX, Sochi Olympics Opening Ceremony, Academy Awards), a new score composed by Jun Miyake (collaborations with Robert Wilson, Pina Bausch, David Byrne and Oliver Stone) dazzling visuals and a company of 30 American and Chinese dancers.

Broadwayworld Dance recently sat down with Daniel Ezralow for an interview.

Q. Why a work about Pearl Buck?

A. Well, the Chinese came to me. The concept originated in China, and they asked if I'd be interested. I knew a little bit about Pearl, and, from my point of view, doing a biography is not exactly what I do, in terms of the work that I create. They then said that they'd like to parallel it with the famous Chinese poem, "Spring River Flower Moon Night," and create an abstract interpretation of her life. And I said, well, yes. I got very excited. The concept of taking a woman who was so extraordinary, and bringing her to life paralleling an abstraction in a dance sense, is a wonderful challenge.

Q. How would you describe Pearl Buck's work?

A. Well, she had different phases. I've chosen to look into her life as a human being, which is the only way that I can approach it as a choreographer/director. It could have been approached in a literary sense, by taking the novels and excerpting pieces of them, but I chose to approach her life, which was as extraordinary as any of her works. I think that's probably what her work is about: for half of her life she lived in China and for the other half in America. She was the one person who, at an extraordinary time in our history, a tumultuous time, both in America and in China, spanned both worlds. She grew up speaking Chinese first, learning everything in Chinese from Confucius scholars. So her mind, though she was born of Presbyterian missionary parents, was that of a common Chinese person. But her extraordinary ability to write, which came through reading Charles Dickens and her education, gave her the ability to do her work, and her great work was a cultural bridge between East and West.

Q. There's going to be a cast of 30-that's quite large. How are they being used?

A. There are five characters that actually play Pearl at different points in her life. I've chosen to start with the end. I've invited a wonderful dancer named Margie Gillis, who is now in her sixties, to play Pearl - the "old" Pearl. There are four other Pearls that span her life, basically paralleling the sections of the poem: Spring River Flower Moon Night. So there are those five characters that actually embody Pearl on stage, and then there is a cast of people, purposefully multi-cultural, multi-racial, Asian and American. There are five Chinese dancers from China in the show. I went to Zhenjiang, where Pearl grew up and lived, and worked with a modern dance company there and brought five of them here. I wanted more! Then we cast many different Western and Asian dancers to try to show the elements of what it was like to be both "different" and "the same" in your own body, because Pearl felt both of those.

The dancers are used primarily as dancers. The piece is very much rooted in my sense of athletic modern dance. That's where I come from. I don't have a syllabus, or a kind of movement style, that is one-directed. Movements for me are really universal, and whatever at the time appears to be necessary is the movement that I approach, from a point of view of minimalism or extreme physicality. So I will go from the reaches of physical theatre to absolute technical dance, and really never take a breath. I don't see it as having to be one or the other.

One of the "protagonists" of the show is a river - on stage. That is something that I chose early on, because I thought it was important. I clearly saw that whoever danced on the stage was not necessarily going to dance on a flat stage. The dancers navigate a river on two different levels on stage. I've opened the entire stage up so that there are no wings at all. I've seen the David Koch Theater many times with the New York City Ballet and other companies, and I realized that this story wasn't going to be told as a strictly technical dance piece. It had to shift the audience's perspective right away, and the way to do that was to open the stage wide up, and put a river on stage. It's not typically what George Balanchine or Lincoln Kirstein had planned, but I thought it was very important--to open that theatre up and show what Philip Johnson, the great architect, designed. It was the way I could communicate the expanse of the story and the breadth of who Pearl Buck was, but also what China is: a very big land with a very large river, the Yangtze, which spans right through the center of the country. Most cultures lived along that river, just as Pearl Buck did in the city of Zhenjiang. And the water also represents the Pacific Ocean, and the flow of life.

Q. Could you describe the costume design and the video design?

A. Oana Botez, the costume designer, is fabulous, and has done a wonderful job of taking my ideas and extrapolating and interpreting them. The costumes are very beautiful and very simple at the same time, and I think that's what I really wanted. I didn't feel like it needed ornateness or exaggeration-just clarity and simplicity, and she's done an amazing job.

The video is wonderfully done by a group called Mirada. A friend of mine, Mathew Cullen, is one of the founders of the company. He's created so many award winning videos for all sorts of artists, from Sara Bareilles, to Katy Perry, to Adele, and he's also done feature films and many, many commercials. I was excited because he works on a very high level of storytelling. I got Mirada involved, and I said, "Would you like to do a theatre piece?" and they said, "Oh, fantastic." So, the images are very high quality and very beautiful. We wanted to use the visual sense as an addition to the storytelling. That was my primary objective; without writing words on the screens, I wanted to help the audience understand what the story of her life was about. I thought we could do that through these elements. We've chosen not to do it on large screens, but on panels, multiple panels that rise and lower throughout the show.

Q. How did you go about choreographing the work?

A. One thing I understood very clearly was that it was going to be very hard to approach it in any literal sense. So the poem gave me the freedom to be abstract with it. When you think about Pearl, many people think about The Good Earth, her Pulitzer Prize-winning and Nobel Prize-winning book, and the 1937 Academy Award winning movie. One of our scenes is very much a feeling of the farmers of The Good Earth, so you'll get that sense. There are many things that inspired me; there's a moment where she was a six-year-old and wrote an essay, a little paragraph - four of her brothers and sisters had already died from cholera and various diseases in China - and she wrote this wonderfully curt little essay for the Louisville Christian Observer which said, "Oh, they've all gone home to heaven, to their real home in heaven," in a very playful way. So I used that for inspiration.

She was part of a show created by the radio personality Edward R. Murrow in the '50s and '60s called "This I Believe." He invited many world-renowned artists, creators, and writers to speak on his radio show. She wrote an essay called "Roll Away The Stone," basically describing that every human heart is good, and it's just the stone that's on top of the plant that keeps the plant from seeing the light. All we need to do is roll away that stone and allow that plant to spring up to the light. It's just this extraordinary, four-minute little essay that she spoke on his radio show, and I've used that as a kind of narrative for the very last section.

There's one central thing that I discovered, and that was by travelling to China and by learning about Pearl. It was that in our lives on this planet, we all are born and come into this world, and we all have our various understandings of what is right and what is wrong, but somewhere as children we learn to protect ourselves, and that's because someone tells us, "This is not good," or "This is good." Pearl had this extraordinary ability to look at the unknown with curiosity, and approach it with curiosity rather than with fear. And I think that is one of the central themes that I wanted to create, and I thought about it a lot in developing the choreography.

Q. This was a commissioned score by Jun Miyake. Can you describe it?

A. I chose Jun Miyake, who is a wonderful composer. I was very inspired by his work on the film Pina, about Pina Bausch. He's a composer who has worked with David Byrne way back when, and many different people. He's done a lot of wonderful things. He's a Japanese gentleman who lives between Tokyo and Paris. I was so inspired by Wim Wenders' film, Pina; I know Pina's work, and Jun Miyake had written some work for Pina, but I was so impressed by the film that I just called him. I said, "Hey, hello! I'd be very interested if you'd like to do this." And he said yes, and he flew over to Los Angeles and we talked about ideas - I was in the initial creative process of thinking about how to interpret some of these things. Then he went back to Paris, and he recorded in different places around the world, which is great. He recorded some of the women from the Bulgarian Voices choir, because he's very close with them, and he recorded in Tokyo, and Belgium. He put a great score together, and I'm very excited about it; I think the music is wonderful, and it really lends itself to the storytelling.

Q. The dance will be told in five symbolic stages? Could you elaborate on this?

A. The inspiration is the poem, which is basically five words. I love how it's said in Chinese without the linkages. It's just, "Spring River Flower Moon Night." There's no "and" or "the," and what it did to me when I first heard it was to open my mind. I started to isolate her story and analyze as I researched about Pearl. I went to her homes in both Pennsylvania and Zhenjiang, and in Nanjing, China. And I started to understand, it became apparent that "Spring" was her childhood, and that was going to be the period when she was really young in China and felt like she was Chinese. In fact, it's a little Asian girl who plays her, not a western girl. Then, "River" was her travels. She went so many times between America and China, and in the beginning of the 20th century it wasn't easy to go between them. You had to go by boat, by train, and then across the country to get to the east coast as well. So I felt that "River" was movement; it really described the movement of her life.

Then she had conflicts at the end of that period, and she actually divorced her husband. It was a great flowering period. She had a child, who ended up being diagnosed as mentally handicapped, and she was devastated; she had to start doing something to pay for the care. So there was this important need to flower, and she did flower. She started to write, and her novels during the "Flower" period just poured out of her. She met her husband-to-be, Richard Walsh, who was the publisher of John Day Publishing in New York City. It became probably the greatest relationship of writer and publisher in the world. He published every one of her novels, and she wrote everything for him.

"Flower" is also the period when she actually came back to America. She had her daughter in a home nearby her in New Jersey, and her creativity flowered like crazy, until suddenly Walsh had a stroke, and he passed away. She was vilified by Joseph McCarthy, she couldn't get back to China, and she was incredibly homesick. She wanted to know the Chinese like she had known them before the revolution, and that period is "Moon." It's, I think, a reflection period, yet at the same time all of her books are being read throughout the world in multiple languages, so her reach is expansive. I do a piece called "The Big Body" during that section, in which her reach goes everywhere around the world. Yet, she still wanted to get back to China. She tries, and she was denied a visa because they said, we find your views about our communist political beliefs to be inconsistent, and we don't want you coming to China. So in America, they thought she was a communist sympathizer, which she wasn't - she didn't believe in the communist system - but she loved China, which was different from communism. So she was out of both places. That's "Moon."

I realized that "Night" could tell about her passing and her end, but that's not what it's about, because, in a very wonderful way, Pearl lives on through her humanitarian causes. She founded the first international adoption agency. She worked for civil rights, for women's rights, for human rights. She did these extraordinary things, and many thousands and thousands of children have been saved; Amer-Asian children, half American from soldiers who went there, and half Asian, who were abandoned. So I realized that "Night" was really about her legacy and all of the extraordinary things that she's done.

Q. What comes after Pearl?

A. A little bit of a breather. I'm starting up a company. I've had dance companies at different times, but now I actually have an organization called Ezralow Dance, that is going to be touring. It'll be playing a stop in California, in Temecula, and then it will go into the Prince Theatre in Philadelphia for a week in February. Then we'll come back out to Beverly Hills and play the Annenberg. There are other things brewing, but I'm not yet sure which is the right one to go for. In the meantime, I'm going to really work on Ezralow Dance, a wonderful eight-dancer company that will tour.

Photograph: Jim Cox

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