Peggy Choy’s Film ‘Dreams of the Abandoned Daughter’ Premiers: An Eclectic Blend of Ideas (Part 1 of 2)
Above: Peggy Choy at UW-Madison’s Lathrop Hall
Below: A still from her movie “Dreams of the Abandoned Daughter”
by Jonathan Gramling
Peggy Choy, a UW-Madison Dance Professor has had her original works performed in Madison, New York City and the world. While Choy is steeped in her Korean heritage, she loves to explore the boundaries of form and ideas to create new expressions that take her art to a new level.
And it was the COVID pandemic that steered her into a new place of blending and collaboration, which resulted in her film ‘Dreams of the Abandoned Daughter’ that is going to be premiering at the Chazen Museum April 17th.
“I think COVID changed everything because I was getting ready for another live performance in New York,” Choy said. “Dreams of the Abandoned Daughter was going to be onstage in Brooklyn. And then COVID hit.”
When the pandemic hit in 2020, Choy and much of the arts community had to decide what they were going to do with their lives.
“We all had to problem solve when COVID just struck everything,” Choy said. “What are we going to do? Are we just going to sit down on our couches and watch TV, which I had never done before? A lot of people did. A lot of dancers dropped out of dancing completely because they also had to find full-time jobs. There was no dance going on in New York, probably here too. And so it was a hard time. And I had to decide what I was going to do too. So I said, ‘Oh well, I might as well try to make a film. And I never really anguished over it. I just said, ‘I’m going to do it.’ I had already made a very short film called ‘Samurai Momma’ during COVID. It didn’t give me a lot of experience, but I thought I could take this next larger challenge.”
The seeds for ‘Dreams’ had been planted before the pandemic hit in 2020. It was prescient.
“I had this idea that an unknown virus had hit a kingdom,” Choy said. “That was the kernel of the plot. It revolved around the climate crisis. I was very concerned about the climate crisis as I am now. But it started with that concern. One of the outcomes of the climate crisis is increased illnesses on a massive scale. So I had invented this story that a town would be struck by this unknown virus. And I was looking around for more of the story. And then I found it with a legend or myth. It was a Korean myth about the Goddess of the Underworld. And so I combined that Korean myth with this idea of the climate crisis. I was still continuing my research on the environment and how it was changing because of the climate crisis. I consulted with professors on this campus in biology, microbiology. They were also inspirational to me to evolve my story down to the microbiome level looking at the building blocks of fungi, the mycelium.”
The film ‘Dance’ blends different ideas and dance styles to create a meaty, eclectic movie that has substance and message no matter which way you look at it. But in order to get there, Choy had to learn the art of film-making.
“It’s very different,” Choy observed. “The filming is very broken up so that you can do the start and the finish in one take, whereas in performance, you have to build much more methodically. I did choreograph large sections, but not as much as I do when I create a whole performance. The story telling is very different. The question is, ‘How can you build a story out of these more disparate fragments of information. So movement and sound, I used libretto and spoken word. Most of the people whom I filmed were in New York. One was here, Lacouir Yancey, a long time associate of my dance ensemble. I had to film him separately here. I also brought a few dancers from New York to film here. So I had to go back and forth, which is the nature of my involvement with dance. It’s been very much commuting from Wisconsin to New York.”
Creating the film is much more complex than producing a danced performance. In some ways, film-making gives one more freedom and ways to tell the story.
“You can focus in more on the faces, which I ended up doing, more close-ups to capture maybe more of the emotion that you are trying to create,” Choy said. “But you can never lose sight of the whole body in movement. So you do have to tell dancers how to move. And because dancers are dancers, they move their whole bodies. So whether or not you film their feet, they are going to move their feet in a certain way. And the dancers I used are expert in their own forms, which are diverse, be it Chinese martial arts or hip hop dance forms or African Diasporic dance. They are all familiar with their genres. And then they move their feet — and whole bodies — accordingly. And so I try to capture what they are trying to tell through their own vocabulary the expression and the storytelling that Dreams of the Abandoned Daughter required.
And it also was much bigger than the creator could do on her own.
“I had to hire and look for a very good editor,” Choy said. “That was a big challenge. I had to hire videographers. I usually had two cameras at a shoot. I hired two in New York City, but also Aaron Granat who works on this campus. He is highly respected in the area of film editing and videography. He worked in the jazz department. That’s where I first knew him. He has even helped with the post-production editing, which I am still working on.”
And in order to tell a complex story using Korean myth and hard science, Choy used an eclectic ensemble of dancers to tell the story.
“It was actually an interesting and fun process,” Choy said. “I brought in a dancer I’ve never worked with before. And I also invited in dancers with whom I worked with in the 1990s. It was a reunion, and yet fresh dancing. I enjoyed that. And then I challenged dancers, particularly Z Motion and Lacouir Yancey, in a way that they had never been challenged before. They had to be the mycelium. They had to become these mycelium, which are these microscopic building blocks of fungi, so they had to develop with me a vocabulary for movement to express this thing that they had probably never thought of before.”
And perhaps what gave it a universal message is the diverse dance styles that Choy wanted to be a part of the fabric of the story.
“The dancers whom I work with are expert in certain genres and not all,” Choy observed. “But they have a wide exposure. For example, Z Motion is a B-boy breakdancer, but familiar with all genres of hip hop dance, which include breaking, locking and popping. So is Lacouir, but Lacouir is also familiar with Chinese martial arts and Chinese health massage. Diane Harvey Salaam is expert in African Diaspora dance and modern dance genres. And so they all come very equipped, very articulate in their own forms. And I am familiar with them so, I know how to draw them into the story. And I like that diversity. It’s something that I have always worked with since I started my ensemble in 2009. And I want them to keep their identities and not dance in a single genre.”
And while the major theme is about the climate crisis, there is also a sub-theme dealing with the role of girls and women in society.
“Besides being about the climate crisis, there is an undertone of looking at girls or women,” Choy said. “The princess was thrown away by her parents. They told the servant to take her to the forest to die — that’s my story — because she was the fourth girl in the family. They wanted a male heir and they were still hoping for male heir. She’s meant nothing to them, so she is thrown away. She is abandoned. And so a lot of the story is about what she does in her abandonment. And she is able to concoct this medicine through the help of the mycelium, which she then takes back because she is full of filial piety. She takes this to he dying parents who have been struck this virus. It’s very much looking at the issue of how we value still to this day in the United States women and girls and babies. That’s a big part of the story.”
The premier of ‘Dreams of the Abandoned Daughter’ is April 17th at the Chazen Museum. It is free and open to the public.
“I hope to draw a diverse audience, those who are interested in the climate crisis, dance and the performing arts, dance film and the sciences that deal with our microbiome and cellular health,” Choy said. “I’ve consulted with Professor Nancy Keller who is in the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. She’s in immunology and microbiology. The film is short. For a dance film, it is long. They typically run 6 minutes of longer. Mine is about 24 minutes. At the premier, we’ll also have a discussion. I’m pulling together a panel that includes Professor Nancy Keller, Z Motion, Lacouir Yancey and Drew Carlton who lives in Rio, Wisconsin. He’s a long-time friend who took some of the drone footage in a state park for me that is incorporated in the film.”