Lunar New Year kicks off Monday, celebrating the start of the Year of the Monkey, an animal recognized across Asia for its cleverness, curiosity and playfulness.
Those qualities probably call to mind someone very dear to you — the kid you'll be trying to entertain at home that day, when New York City public schools close for the first time ever in observance of the holiday.
You could, instead, send her to learn the monkey dance from National Dance Institute teachers during the NYC Lunar New Year Students Day at the Javits Convention Center.
”The thing we’re focusing on in the dances that we’re doing are this idea that the monkey is clever and a trickster and very, very intelligent and alert to the world around him," said Kathryn Gayner, director of NDI's China Project, which coordinates cultural exchanges between the public school students studying with the Harlem-based institute and children receiving services from a Chinese NGO called the China Welfare Institute.
Public school students Robert Custodio and Murphy Leung look extremely alert during a rehearsal last weekend. (Credit: Bianca Johnson)
Gayner, one of four instructors leading the class Monday, learned the monkey dance herself last month, on a trip to China.
Her studies with Huang Doudou, an accomplished Chinese classical dancer she calls "the Baryshnikov of China," taught her not only the steps of the folk dance, but the story of the Monkey King it emulates.
“It’s one of the most famous myths or fairy tales that every child [in China] grows up knowing," she said. "The Monkey King ... uses cleverness and guile to trick all the other animals in the kingdom to do his will or to govern appropriately."
Don't mess with these monkeys.
A dancer playing the Monkey King must keep her wrists in front of her body, her fingers relaxed, her darting back and forth, Gayner explained. Some of her movements will be slow and lyrical, others quick and sudden.
"It’s very playful choreography: there’s a lot of scratching behind the ears and galumphing around."
Monkeys galumphing
On Monday, 80 National Dance Institute student dancers will perform a monkey dance routine set to music composed for the occasion by Matt Fettbrandt and influenced by Chinese melodies. Then the audience (Gayner is hoping for a few hundred attendees) will learn a small excerpt.
Chinese dance, said the program director who has taken American students to perform in China and invited Chinese students to perform here, can be a "catalyst for fostering beautiful relations and better understanding” between the U.S. and China.
Especially if it's as fun as the Monkey King's.
Where: Javits Center North, 655 West 34th St., Midtown West
When: NDI student dancers perform at 10 a.m.; a sample class follow immediately after; a second performance and sample class begin at 11:30 a.m.
