Lacking roots in either of his ancestral places of origin, a Chinese-French dancer learns to inhabit his own body as a territory of life.
Chang Liu
Chang (right) posing with Toh (left), another member of the Toronto Thai Dance Troupe, after a performance at the International Dance Festival in Toronto, 2022. Photo: Worrawat Engchuan
I am having an intense “in-of-body” experience. In the forty-degree-Celsius heat, my white shirt is plastered to my skin, and the folds of my johng-graben — the red sarong that marks a student of Thai dance — are slowly coming undone. Getting its fabric to twist neatly around the legs and knotting it securely is an art I will not master for many more weeks. It’s an ancient form of dress, worn by dance students of all genders and far more sensible in Thailand’s oppressive humidity than Western shorts. No matter your body type, whether you are sitting sedately or striking a horse stance, in a johng-graben you can look elegant.
But right now, elegance is not my priority. My temples throb with effort, my eyes cannot blink away the sweat fast enough, and every muscle is starting to shake uncontrollably because my khruu — Thai for “guru” — is ordering me to hold this one-legged dance pose. It’s been five minutes. Helpfully, he remarks, “When I was a student, we held it over fifteen minutes! If my leg sagged, the teacher whacked it hard with a bamboo rod. Lucky for you, that’s been banned.”
All the while, he makes endless adjustments: with a prim slap he corrects the “unlovely” angle of my arms or pulls my fingers further back toward the wrist. Sometimes he puts a knee in my back and, with his hands, pries open my quivering thighs to correct my insufficiently wide horse stance. My entire body feels, in every possible way, insufficient.
The year is 2004. I am the lone foreign student and the only thirty-two-year-old freshman at Thailand’s College of Dramatic Arts in Bangkok. I have just quit a good job in Toronto to train here in an art that has fascinated me ever since my first trip to Thailand.
Chang (right) with one of his dance teachers, Khruu Pong (left), and a friend at Wittayalai Natasin College of Dramatic Arts in Bangkok, 2004. Photo: Unknown
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But now I struggle with the unfamiliar rhythms, the unrelenting humidity, and the sheer size of the Thai alphabet — seventy-six letters that are key to decoding the lyric sheets for each dance. My ego is further bruised by the natural gracefulness of my much younger fellow students. And my body itself feels foreign as it tries to mimic beautiful but excruciating postures and movements to which it was not born.
Yet all this pain and sweat — and the occasional victory when I realize my muscle memory is growing — all point to one truth: as insufficient as it feels, my body is my only anchor in this new territory, that of life as a foreign student of Thai dance.
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The expression “territories of life” has been used to refer to places in which Indigenous and other local cultures have evolved in a complex symbiosis of human and non-human, deriving sustenance and spiritual meaning from the earth and, in turn, infusing sustenance and meaning back into the land and waters. More than ever, this ancestral bond is a beacon for the rest of humanity as we face our eleventh-hour reckoning: will we remain a Destroyer subspecies, or will we evolve into Restorers?
The growing and global consensus is that it is vital for the entire planet that we recognize, honor, and help protect the territories of life that Indigenous Peoples have nurtured for so long, and where the highest levels of biocultural diversity are still found.
But this also presents many non-Indigenous people — especially immigrants and those who adopt or are born into an urban lifestyle, or who have a mixed heritage — with a major and even existential quandary. No matter how great an affinity they may develop with the lands they live on and love, no matter how many generations of their forebears have lived here, they are not indigenous to wherever here is. Lacking the ancestral interconnections to the very places we call home, we continue to destroy them.
Wherever I find myself, with time my body begins to feel rooted.
For an ever-growing portion of humanity, this permanent sense of disconnect from the land and waters we live on is only reinforced by severance from our original homelands, those of our immigrant forebears. Hence two existential questions: Can we become rooted anew to a territory of life? If so, how?
As a non-Indigenous person of mixed ethnicity, I lack the security of a single cultural affiliation and the stability of a bond to a specific territory of life. I must forge my own identity, find my own territory. Yet I have noticed that, wherever I find myself, with time my body begins to feel rooted. How to explain an embodied belonging to places that are not my ancestral home? And, assuming I can form new connections to a given land, how to sustain them in this age of globalized nomadism?
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A possible answer to these difficult questions grew out of my training in Thai dance. It was 2004 — long before I heard of biocultural diversity or territories of life — but strange new seeds had already found the receptive loam of my body, from my fingers to my feet.
In traditional Thai dance, a distant cousin of the gestural dances of India, the fingers often bend back in a graceful curve that recalls leaves, flower petals, palms swaying, a bird in flight, or a pollinating bee. To acquire this improbable skill, training must begin in childhood when the joints are still soft and malleable. It is not just their wonderfully expressive hands but a very long tradition of refined movement that turns Thai dancers into living frescoes. Watching them, you feel taken out of time. Performers of Khone, the masked dance that depicts the Ramakhien (the Thai version of the Indian Ramayana), filled me with awe, envy, and despair. From my diary: “One must be born into it. Will I ever become half as good?”
A traditional hand-and-elbow-bending warm-up, done before a dance class or performance using the weight of a leg over a knee. Photo: Lang Liu
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Before each class, I would spend an hour soaking my hands in warm water to loosen the joints, then sit in the traditional hand-stretching position. Additionally, this made me feel I was immersing my whole self, body–spirit, into the universe of Thai dance, joining an unbroken line of students, teachers, spirits, and deities going back to the dawn of the art. This lineage is, in fact, what all Thai dancers invoke with prayers and offerings before each dance.
In many cultures, dancers play a special role because they embody so many aspects of territories of life.
In many cultures, dancers play a special role because they embody so many aspects of territories of life: focused energy, radiant health, an identity strongly rooted in a vibrant culture, and a living link from the past to the future. As in India, Thai dancers’ bare feet are a direct conduit to the earth, making visible the invisible.
Reenergized by the earth-bound movements of dance, the body deepens its connection to the land. The foreign student of dance, however, must enter a new ecosystem of movement, rhythm, music, language, and myth. Although at first this can be destabilizing, even painful, through dance the body becomes a direct link to a vast cultural past and the natural world that nourished it. Gradually, the ecology of the dancer’s own body changes and gains in diversity, awareness, and resilience.
A dance offering to live music at the famous Erawan Shrine in Bangkok, Thailand. Dancers begin by chanting a prayer to the shrine’s spirit. Photo: Chang Liu
Through dance, the body becomes a direct link to a vast cultural past and the natural world that nourished it.
So, wherever I may find myself on earth, I remain indigenous to my own body. Being welcomed into a dance tradition that was not mine allowed my body-spirit to expand in new, life-affirming directions. Could dance — especially traditional dances, which evolved in pre-industrial times — help re-anchor us to our own bodies, and thus to the earth?
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Boisterous 18-year-old students in Chang’s first-year dance class at Wittayalai Natasin College of Dramatic Arts in Bangkok, 2004. Photo: Chang Liu
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Today is my first dance class. Rowdy but friendly eighteen-year-old boys crowd around the new student, begging me to teach them a few juicy English profanities. They are so much like teens back home. However, when the teacher presses Play on the CD player, something amazing happens. Each boy snaps into postures that have remained essentially unchanged for a thousand years. “Myth” comes to life — this is no longer 2004 but time immemorial. In fact, it dawns on me, the actual myth may well be “modernity”!
Their strong, pliant hands are the result of a dance regimen that started at age nine or younger. And their ability to “channel” the deities they depict is disturbing, beautiful. Over the next few weeks, I start to keep a notebook of dance terms, sometimes adding sketches for better recall.
A page from Chang’s notebook of Thai dance vocabulary, with descriptions in English. Photo: Chang Liu
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The first dance I learn turns out to be prophetic: Pra Wai Inspects His Troops. This is a martial dance: wide horse stances, arms tracing great arcs, hands in “blooming lotus” gesture elegantly wielding a daab (long sword). But what the teachers and students do not know is that my real-life battlefield is my own body.
Self-doubt hounded me throughout my year of training. At the same time, slowly my limbs and joints got stronger and more flexible, and I felt more confident, not just in dance but in my Thai language skills. My injuries healed: aching fingers loosened; ankles overcame the sharp pains brought on by prolonged one-foot postures. The strange rhythms began seeping into my bones. And the peculiar, almost coy head-sway, at first impossible to mimic, to this day feels natural even though I dance less now. Knowledge stored in muscle and bone.
My body, mysterious, racked with pain but also resilient and aware, was a new territory of life, and I its sole occupant.
Using a wooden sword, Chang practices the martial dance Pra Wai Inspects His Troops in his apartment in Bangkok, 2004. Photo: Chang Liu
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One blistering afternoon, Khruu Peeak stunned me: “Geng maak maa rian tee nee!” (“You’ve got talent coming to train here!”). His praise was a quenching rain. Khruu Pong’s stingier but hard-won nod of approval felt just as good. From my diary: “I feel proud to be scarred, tested, a stubborn piece of pottery which, in the end, accepts and receives the glaze. Yesterday, Khruu Jintana was the third to say I have improved. Three teachers can’t all be lying.”
Training in Thai dance meant not just overcoming a late start and a language barrier, but mapping the territory of dance — that hard-wired ecology of rhythm, music, and gesture that seemed shared by all Thais, even those with no interest in dance. In fact, I lost count of the Thais I met whose fingers, even untrained, naturally curved back!
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Looking back on my time inside the fiery kiln of Thai dance, I see that “territories of life” exist along two spectra: one of scale — from ecosystem to individual body — and one of lineage: from ancestral claims to possible (if perhaps controversial) contemporary adoption. All communities are formed of individuals, each one a body-biome. My body, the territory I inhabit, is woven of the same molecules and elements as the terrestrial biomes that support it.
My body, the territory I inhabit, is woven of the same molecules and elements as the terrestrial biomes that support it.
As mixed-race children of immigrants, the only territory of life we can claim outright is our body. The poet and ecological storyteller Sophie Strand speaks of “the body as an ancestor, an assemblage of ecosystems.” We each inherit earth’s elements in all their dancing diversity, the same that previously coalesced into the bodies of our ancestors, the same that are released after each death to coalesce into other beings.
My body is not just me — it is literally my ancestor-Earth — and not just interdependent with the natural world, but an expression of it.
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In my second semester, the dean of my Thai dance school tested me on a foundational dance. Afterward, he pronounced, “Rum dai!” (“You can dance!”). I had started learning the “Mae Bote Lek” in 2001 and, over the years, had continued under five different teachers. A single dance, just ten minutes long, yet a life journey. The “Mae Bote Lek” — mae bote means “mother lesson” or “master dance,” and lek means “small,” indicating a shortened version of the much longer dance known as the “Mae Bote Yai” — is a portal into the ecosystem of Thai dance, in many ways into Thai culture itself, because it teaches concentration, calm, beauty, and interconnection. It is no accident that its movements often mimic flora and fauna.
Chang in a “divinity” pose at the beginning of the “Mae Bote Lek” dance while performing at the Union Language School’s Christmas party in Bangkok, 2005. Photo: Chang Liu
I step once more onto the territory of sacred dance, and once more I feel my body rooting me to the earth, my home.
Thai dance has given me so much: strength, endurance, and better posture; also, patience and acceptance of my limits balanced by confidence in my body’s intrinsic wisdom — a balance I find troublingly absent from our technocentric society. When I step barefoot onto a stage, transformed by the intricate layers of a costume that glitters like sunrise or moonlight, I step once more onto the territory of sacred dance, and once more I feel my body rooting me to the earth, my home.
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Chang (right) and Toh (left) in the classical Thai dance pose that signifies Love. Peaked crowns adorned with rose and jasmine, elaborate jewelry, and golden nail extensions evoke celestial beings from the Ramakhien. Photo: Worrawat Engchuan
See Chang Liu dance at bit.ly/3VuaScp
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Chang Liu is a writer, editor, translator, and conservationist living in Thailand. He is half Chinese, half French, and (arguably) Thai in some past life. For many years a member of the Toronto Thai Dance Troupe, Chang believes that in our increasingly “cerebro-centric” modern world, traditional dance forms powerfully re-anchor us to our own bodies and thus to the earth.
