The hard and the not
The journey has not always been an easy one for Six Carat. The first challenge was not so much the dancing itself as the teaching. Hsu was able to find teachers from among the students at the Department of Senior Citizen Welfare and Business, but the real concern was the amount of patience required to teach the elderly members the moves. Fortunately, the first teacher they had, Liao Yali, had plenty of experience with dance along with the patience necessary, and found teaching the troupe “pretty fascinating.”
But how would these elderly dancers take to the hip-winding, fast-paced moves and the bright colors of their outfits? After all, learning hip-hop dance well enough to perform on stage would be the bare minimum required of the troupe, and hip-hop dance has a look, sound, and style that are distinctive to it which they would need to adopt. Having reached their 70s and 80s, though, the members would be coming to it with their own long-held values and ideas. Would they really be able to communicate with young people on their level, or even be open to their way of thinking?
For example, the song they started out with—Lady Gaga’s “Telephone”—was in unfamiliar English and had a rhythm and sound to it completely unlike the Taiwanese songs and music they were accustomed to. Would they even be able to pick up the rhythm? Their instructors, themselves not especially good Taiwanese speakers, worked hard to mix a few phrases of the language in with their Mandarin, along with using body language and tone of voice to help convey her ideas to the dancers and encourage them to dance along with popular music. Looping ten- or 20-second sections of the music, Liao broke the dance routine down step by step, helping her dancers gradually get used to the music through repetition. “After a while, they even started counting out the beats themselves!” she exclaims.
The next step was making everyone pop in their performances and enabling them to coordinate with projects like Hondao Senior Citizens Welfare Foundation’s Seniors on Broadway, which meant a distinctive and colorful uniform. Their second dance teacher, Liu Xinru, arranged with sportswear maker Funiversity for the troupe to be kitted out for their performance in the baggy basketball uniforms so common in hip-hop dance, made in a bold, eye-catching purple.
At first, the troupe members were repulsed, with some remarking that no self-respecting person their age would dress like that, leaving Liu shedding tears of frustration. Nevertheless, she persisted, talking it over with them and asking family members to help out by doing things like passing around photos or videos of the members in their uniforms to friends. As the positive reactions grew, the elderly dancers began to realize that wearing the outfits wasn’t as bad as they had thought, and actually was kind of neat. Their resistance began to soften, and after their performance at the Taipei Arena, they even started to see the uniforms as a source of pride.
Beyond the dancers, Six Carat also depends on another key figure—the leader of their volunteer team, Huang Zhanggeng. To the members and teachers of Six Carat, and to Hsu Mei-chi, Huang is all but a wizard, capable of handling virtually any problem that arises. When the microphone in their second-floor hall is out of power, Huang whips out a battery from who-knows-where; when one of the dancers is a no-show, Huang finds out what happened with a phone call so practice can go on without worries; when the troupe hits the road, Huang is there with their boxed lunches and drinking water. And if they don’t have enough dancers, guess who’s there to fill in?
Time may have taken their youth, but it has done nothing to dampen their energy or their creative spirits. (photos by Jimmy Lin)