Gang Fang's Blog

[This post received zero editing. What you read is what I wrote. I use AI transcription to convert my voice into text that you read.In the era of heavy editing and filtering, I want my voice to be as genuine and honest as possible, Cloest to the source]

I figured I will ask this question that I hoped more people will ask me but not really. I’m not that popular or well-known in the dance community and of course nobody would think of asking me this question.The ironic thing is without participating in competitions I wouldn’t have a high chance of being noticed. So this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But I need to ask and answer this question anyway because it is important. And maybe, Just maybe someone will pick it up one day in the future (gentle music). Or I get so good that I get noticed even without competing.

I decided to stop joining competitions particularly freestyle competition in American chic style like popping. Last year after I had a devastating round in the Vancouver chic dance festival. I wanted to free myself from the conscious and unconscious orientation towards competing in my day to day dance practice and dancing in general. (gentle music)I told Katie, my contemporary teacher, at that time and I said, I was afraid of losing motivation, but I would see.

Fast forward half a year into 2025, I have a concrete answer to my fear at least. And that is, my motivation has not decreased but rather increased.I guess I would attribute this change to my inherent passion in movements and music.I don’t need an external aims for me to be consistent and persistent in my daily practice. I do it because I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it because I feel good about it. And it provides a constant challenge for my body and my mind in terms of the techniques and understanding.

Very specifically about one concrete change I decided to implement upon my decision to quit competing is to experiment with fusing, popping and contemporary.This task has proven to be a lot more uncertain, ambiguous, abstract, and ambitious than I sometimes thought. Like, I would put down in my notes with the goal of achieving fusion in the next 10 days or something.But looking back, I realized I have been on this goal for the entire six months. And the destination is still elusive.But one thing gives me comfort and that is I think the direction is in my hand where I can push the boundary of dance. If not collectively, at least in the individually for myself.The little backstory is that back in 2020 when I first moved to Seattle and started working, I had this goal of playing to push the envelope of dance, but had no way of implementing it in a concrete manner. Now I do.

So this is the first half of the answer to why I stopped competing.Let me lay out the second half. second half.

The other day I went to the AGO Art Gallery of Ontario with my date and we went to see the Modernism exhibition. In that, we saw a couple of works by Jack Bush, an abstract painter representing Canada.I found this quote that I really like in the description the museum gave to the artist. In 1947, Bush was diagnosed with anxiety, for which his doctor prescribed that he experiment more in the art studio as a means of self-expression. As we counted by Bush in his diary, his doctor told him to paint freely the inner feelings and moods, and starting from a blank canvas with no preconceived ideas and just let the thing develop in color, form, and content. unquote.

This quote really stuck with me as I continued my daily practices focusing on intention, expression and breathing.The quote came back to me again and again. As I was attempting to through movement tell audiences something even though in yoga studio without anybody else meaning the only audience is myself in the mirror I wanted to say something to show something and to express something. Initially, I used the conventional approach at least what I thought of as the conventional approach, which is to label the emotion of a song and then to fit my movements and my facial expression to that label.Almost feels like a supervised learning process in machine learning.But as I go on with this process, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of fakeness in this approach. As in, I would have to pretend to feel a certain mood that fits the music and force myself to actualize that.This feels ingenuine and dishonest. And then the Jack Bushes quote came back to me again.

Instead of using labels, which a lot of the time are not practical anyway because of all the nuances in good music, sophisticated music, why not just do whatever that comes out from the bottom of my heart?Why not just dance whatever I feel at that particular moment literally, without any filters, and preconceived directions?I started trying that out and interesting things started coming out almost immediately. And I also noticed the similarity between this new at-the-moment approach and all the meditation and breathing practice I have encountered throughout the years.meditation asks me to pay attention to my bodily sensations or in a more general term to pay attention to my senses and that is what I do exactly in this approach I pay attention to my senses and move accordingly. In that case, mood and feeling is simply an additional dimension of my sense. All these senses are sources that motivate my movements.

And through that, I achieve the most raw, the most genuine, and the most honest self-expression ever through movements.And this is the second half of my answer. (And I vaguely remember this is called movement meditation probably coined by Katie.

And here we go the two principles for my dance journey moving forward into an unknown yet incredibly exciting future. First, technically speaking, I look for changes and innovations. Artistically speaking, which is the second point, I freely dance my moods and inner feelings and all my senses. genuinely.