Dispatches from China: Dancers teach lessons to Chinese about cowboys, Indians and Montana

Dispatches from China: Dancers teach lessons to Chinese about cowboys, Indians and MontanaBy Joe Nickell of the Missoulian
Trick-roping cowboy Wade Black gazes through a notch in the Great Wall of China. Photo by JOE NICKELL/Missoulian
Missoulian Entertainer Editor Joe Nickell is accompanying the Rocky Mountain Ballet Theatre on its tour of China.BEIJING - Around 3 p.m. on Saturday, two plush chartered buses pulled to a stop in a wide spot on a busy road in Beijing. Out of the buses tumbled our group of 42 dancers, instructors, and assorted supporters from the Rocky Mountain Ballet Theatre. We stood in the wide spot of the street for awhile, snapping photos of the opulent new Olympic aquatics facility and the imposing Digital Center that loomed across the road from us.A group of Chinese travelers dressed in matching T-shirts printed with the Olympic logo and the words “Shangxi Modal” stood nearby, smiling and waving Chinese flags. Someone from our group snapped a photo of them.
Soon, several of the American visitors were standing in a row, laughing and shooting photos of the Chinese tourists as they snapped photos of us.This was the closest that the RMBT delegation will get to the Olympics during this two-week visit. The Olympics don't begin for another three months; and despite our escort dispatch of three government handlers, there was no tour of the facilities for us. Just a short stop on the side of a road - a stop that turned into an impromptu cultural encounter in which few words were exchanged, yet permanence was sealed with a hundred digital camera flashes.As we reboarded the buses, a young boy sitting on a pile of construction material nearby lifted both hands to his face as if holding a camera, and shouted, “click-click-click,” until we were gone.It's been surreal like that ever since we landed in Beijing, this smoggy, bustling world where new high-rise towers loom over streets still dominated by rickety old bicycles.At lunch on Saturday - a lunch that featured such culinary curiosities as duck feet and “fungus of the sea” - I asked Native American fancy-dancer Louie Plant of Arlee to tell me about the moment when he first got the sense that he's not in Montana anymore.“You mean besides the 11-hour bus ride, the 11-hour plane ride, the smog, and all the people here?” he replied, laughing. “Well, besides all that, I'd say it's the vendors at the Great Wall (where we visited early Saturday). They're not like at powwows, they're all really aggressive. At powwows, nobody really pushes you to buy things you don't want.”Moments later, Plant experienced yet another moment of cultural surprise, when he learned that Chinese people typically don't finish eating all the food on their plates, out of fear of giving the unintended message that hosts haven't prepared enough food.“Hmm,” he said, staring at his plate for a long moment. “I wonder if I follow my culture's tradition, or theirs?” He eventually ate all of his food.Such cross-cultural quandaries are both unexpected and intentional; indeed, they're at the root of what this trip is about. Though ostensibly organized as a performance tour in semi-conjunction with the Olympics, the RMBT trip to China is more about showing young dancers from Montana what Chinese culture is really about - and showing the Chinese what Montana is really about.As they chat amongst themselves, the dancers seem to get it, at least on a philosophical level, from their own experiences of prejudice.“Wherever I go, people see a cowboy and so they figure there's got to be an Indian around somewhere,” said Wade Black, a trick-roping cowboy brought along on the trip to perform with the RMBT dancers.“Yeah, it's like, ‘Dude, are they gonna fight? They gonna pull out bows and arrows? Cool!' ” joked Shonto Pete, a Native American traditional dancer who lives in Spokane.Still, recognizing those predilections doesn't make the duck feet go down any easier.“I think it'd probably be a little different for somebody from a big city in the United States to come here,” said Black. “Me, I'm from out West. I'm not used to being around this many people. It's definitely a different thing for me.”