{"id":122839,"date":"2019-10-11T12:40:44","date_gmt":"2019-10-11T04:40:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mpweekly.com\/culture\/?p=122839"},"modified":"2020-03-07T18:37:03","modified_gmt":"2020-03-07T10:37:03","slug":"dance-paris-122839","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mpweekly.com\/inner\/blog\/dance-paris-122839","title":{"rendered":"#SpeakingInDance: Parcels of friendship"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the age of 48, Patsy Lo left a high-powered job with Apple Inc. to take up dance (ballet and contemporary Martha Graham techniques) full-time in Paris. She had never danced before.<\/span><\/p>\n

______<\/p>\n

Wake up at 8 am.\u00a0Eat breakfast.\u00a0First class starts at 9:30 am. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Eat lunch around school.\u00a0Go back to class.\u00a0Finish at 3:30 pm<\/span><\/p>\n

Go home. Shower.\u00a0Cook.\u00a0Eat.\u00a0Wash dishes.\u00a0Sleep. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Repeat.<\/span><\/p>\n

About three months into my new life as a dance student in Paris,\u00a0I was sitting at my dining table, holding up my bowl, when I had a Life of Pi moment.\u00a0I yelled silently inside of me to the sky \u2014 to God.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"A

A picture from my first solo performance, of my choreography in Jan. 2019. Photo by Tommaso Giuntini, dance photographer (@t0mm1x, Instagram).<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI cannot continue like this.\u00a0I love dance and Paris.\u00a0But\u00a0I also need friends.\u00a0If I cannot make friends here soon, I will go back to Hong Kong in six months and try to continue dancing there.\u00a0 <\/span>It is, however, not my preference.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I sighed and finished my dinner, washed the dishes and went to bed.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Yes, I was being melodramatic.\u00a0There were challenges in switching from sitting at a desk every day to being a full-time dance student.\u00a0But it was not a life-and-death situation compared to the scenario in Life of Pi.\u00a0In the 2012 movie by Ang Lee, based on a book of the same name, Pi yells to the sky: \u201cYou took my family. You took everything. I surrender.\u00a0What more do you want?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Letting go and surrendering, completely. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Caught

Caught this \u201cwe are best-friends-forever and let\u2019s dress to kill\u201d matching outfit ladies. C\u2019est parafit!<\/p><\/div>\n

I have had to learn to let go.\u00a0Letting go is way harder than trying to control everything \u2014 yet, once you have it, you have it.\u00a0There is even a dance movement from Martha Graham called \u201cpleading\u201d, which is about surrendering.\u00a0It is a deep contraction in which you are required to come off from the floor while emptying the energies of the entire body.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Contemporary dance doyenne Graham has been quoted: \u201cThink of Michelangelo’s Piet\u00e0, or that extraordinary Bernini Ecstasy of St Theresa.\u201d\u00a0It took me seven months to learn this movement. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Surrendering requires that I still know what I prefer, yet always be ready to deal with an opposite outcome.\u00a0It is about staying open and trusting,\u00a0and being on the opposite side of fear.\u00a0You throw your intentions out there and you wait.\u00a0You wait by forgetting about it, by being present with yourself and with others. \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I waited \u2014 and waited.\u00a0I kept eating alone and washing dishes.\u00a0A few months later, a couple of \u201chuman parcels\u201d landed outside my door \u2014 Ivan and Erwann.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Ivan is a curly-haired 26-year-old boy from Dalian.\u00a0He speaks French like a real Chinese Frenchman.\u00a0He made me sign up with all the dating apps.\u00a0Occasionally, he would grab my phone and start answering the messages for me \u2014 until I deleted all of the apps.\u00a0He loves coming to my place on Sunday nights and eating my \u201cwater and rice\u201d congee.\u00a0He proclaims that my congee is the best in Paris.\u00a0Right.\u00a0I started adding red dates and chestnuts so it is not so bland. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Taste

Taste of France: Home-made petit p\u00e2t\u00e9 de P\u00e9zenas, a typical pastry from the south of the country, tastes both\u00a0sweet and salty at the same time.<\/p><\/div>\n

Erwann used to live in Hong Kong.\u00a0He is from Brittany, the beautiful region that is near the sea, in the west of France.\u00a0The region is known for its seafood and architecture.\u00a0Erwann has proven to be indispensable when I need to deal with the visa office, where only French is spoken. He\u00a0is also my cultural advisor.\u00a0 <\/span>Once, I was talking to him about a strange encounter in Paris.\u00a0He suddenly put down his knife and fork, looked up seriously and said: \u201cPatsy, in Paris, if you ask a guy you recently met to \u2018walk me home\u2019 late at night, it means exactly also, \u2018Would you like to see my bedroom?\u2019\u201d\u00a0\u00a0I blushed in disbelief.\u00a0Okay, maybe it was just me who did not know that.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Many more \u201chuman parcels\u201d in different shapes and sizes continue to roll in after Ivan and Erwann.<\/span><\/p>\n

I say that these two landed outside my door because both of them, no matter rain or shine, drunk or sober, noon or in the middle of the night, they would always walk me home, to my door.\u00a0To make sure I get home safely.\u00a0(And thank you, Jason Ip, my crazy happy friend from Hong Kong, for introducing them to me while visiting Paris.)<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the age of 48, Patsy Lo left a high-powered job with Apple Inc. to take up dance (ballet and contemporary Martha Graham techniques) full-time in Paris. She had never danced before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":122841,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,17214],"tags":[15436,15334,15545,15332],"class_list":["post-122839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-patsy-lo","tag-dance","tag-paris","tag-dancer","tag-speakingindance","creator-patsy-lo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mpweekly.com\/inner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mpweekly.com\/inner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mpweekly.com\/inner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mpweekly.com\/inner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/57"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mpweekly.com\/inner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122839"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mpweekly.com\/inner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":134776,"href":"https:\/\/www.mpweekly.com\/inner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122839\/revisions\/134776"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mpweekly.com\/inner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mpweekly.com\/inner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mpweekly.com\/inner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mpweekly.com\/inner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}