Jeri Floyd’s eyes well up with tears as she watches her daughter leap across the stage.
Two weeks before her daughter Rachel’s show, she watches as Rachel dances to “Wisdom of the Moon” on the Royce Hall stage ““ the same music that played during Rachel’s first dance class five years ago. Rachel is now 11, and her mother is overcome by emotion in being able to watch her daughter grow from a wary 6-year-old into a mature dancer.
“To come from, “˜I don’t know the steps, I don’t know where I’m supposed to go,’ to going on stage for the curtain call and taking a bow in front of the Royce Hall audience, it’s a great feat,” Floyd said.
Floyd is the president of the Southern California branch of Families with Children from China, an organization that helps families adopt children from China. Since 2002, FCC has partnered with UCLA’s Chinese Cultural Dance Club to bring adopted girls like Rachel back to their cultural roots by teaching them Chinese cultural dance.
Every year, CCDC invites the girls to dance with them at Royce Hall. Saturday, the time comes again as the club performs its annual show, “Lotus Steps.”
The theme is “inspiration” ““ the mutual inspiration that comes from the companionship between the young girls and their older female mentors at CCDC. The girls interact through their Big sis/Lil’ sis program.
Christina Chung, a UCLA alumna and artistic director for CCDC, said working with the young girls has been a process of growth for both the older girls of CCDC and the younger girls ““ they feed off of each other to make the program successful.
“I’ve asked the girls before what inspires them to dance, and they’ve said their inspiration comes from watching the older girls,” Chung said. “I’ve asked the older girls the same question, and they’ve said that watching the little girls brings them back to what it is to have a pure joy for dance.”
The girls bond through trips to basketball games and cooking nights, and the friendship that has developed can be seen in the dance “Generations,” a number that features all the girls together on one stage.
The youngest girls, ages 6 to 9, tap handheld rattle drums, a common children’s toy, while the girls ages 10 to 13 play the flower drums, instruments associated with flirtatiousness. The oldest girls bang gargantuan barrel drums that are literally the size of their own bodies, completing the progression of generations from childhood to womanhood.
Girls who enter the program reflect this progression. Floyd said her 7-year-old daughter, Jacquelyn, conquered one of her biggest fears last year while rehearsing for the “Lotus Steps” show ““ she performed onstage alone.
“The first day of dance class, she hid behind my knees,” Floyd said. “Then, during rehearsals, she was on the stage by herself. The other girls in her dance group had already left, but she decided that she would go ahead and practice her part. To me, that was worth every hour that we were here on campus, just to give her that confidence to do a solo on the Royce Hall stage.”
To further inspire the girls, Chung said the premise for “Lotus Steps 2007 ““ Inspiration” is to have dances that shatter the stereotype of the demure Asian female.
“We try to show that Chinese dancing is not all about ribbons and fans and looking pretty. Asian women aren’t always reserved,” Chung said.
“A lot of our dances show the strength in women, and it’s not always about the Chinese majority “”mdash; we try to bring in a dance from an ethnic minority every year,” she added.
This year, Chung has done so in “The Daughters of Awa Mountain,” a dance that features the lively, hair-tossing spirits of the Wa minority in China, who are clad in what look more like short flapper dresses than Song dynasty attire.
Back at the rehearsal for this year’s show, the younger girls look on with eager eyes as the CCDC girls practice this very dance. To see such strong, successful female role models, Chung said, endows the girls with not only pride in their culture but also confidence.
“What’s funny is that the shy girls who were here when we first started are the most confident now,” Chung said. “They’ve been here the longest ““ five years. That’s longer than any senior. They’re the ones teaching the older girls how to behave.”
So do the FCC girls feel like part of the CCDC family now?
Gloria Yang, a fourth-year microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics student and external president of CCDC, said the answer lies in how the big sisters and their younger counterparts treat one another.
“They’re like real sisters. They’ll wrestle with each other, or they’ll be on the floor tickling each other,” Yang said.
Jacquelyn, who admitted to not being scared at all about this year’s show, looks up to Chung and has already taken up Chung’s makeup techniques by giving stage makeup application tips at home using a drawn face and crayons.
“I found out through talking to Jacquelyn’s fellow junior dancers that she said, “˜I want to do this every year ’til I graduate from college,'” Floyd said. “So we teased her that she’ll be the longest standing member of CCDC ever.”