Artist Profile: Madeline Lobjois

There is more to classical Chinese dance than what is shown on the surface. It’s an art that pulls from a dancer’s heart, and this shows in their movements and in what they project to the audience.

“It’s vast. It has really deep meaning, and if you don’t know Chinese culture, it’s very hard to dance classical Chinese dance,” said Madeline Lobjois, a classical Chinese dancer trained at Fei Tian Academy of the Arts.

Ms. Lobjois has performed through practicum arrangements in top theaters around the world. She also won awards at NTD Television’s International Classical Chinese Dance Competitions—taking home the Excellence Award in the junior women’s division in 2008, then silver medals in the 2009 and 2010 competitions.

She’s humble about this, noting that training has been key. “If you want to be good, you have to stay late and get up early. You use your lunch time for practice. You sweat a lot. You’re tired, but you know it’s for a good result,” Ms. Lobjois said.

She portrayed different characters in the last two competitions. In 2009, she portrayed a heavenly maiden, and in 2010, she did a dance telling the story of Lady Mu Guiying, a female Chinese general who led her troops to battle after her husband was killed during the Northern Song Dynasty.

Ms. Lobjois said this required her to change her demeanor through the course of the dance. In the beginning, she had to show mourning, then “in the end, I became strong and more determined.”

Relaying these feelings, however, required training in other elements of the art. “The eyes and the heart are, I think, most important,” she said.

“The audience can see your eyes, and you can touch them deeply,” she said. Yet, she added, “Chinese people understand there’s a difference between someone who dances with heart and someone who dances without heart. You can tell the breath of the moves, the softness and everything else is different. It touches the audience.”

“The audience can tell that it’s different from other dances,” Ms. Lobjois said. “They’ll say the dancers are so pure and have a magical feeling. They can’t really describe this feeling. This feeling comes from the Chinese culture. It’s something inner that you can’t see from the outside.”

Training this, she said, takes time. “It’s not like you can just say you get it and you can do it. You can get it, but you might not be able to do it,” she said, adding, “It also has something to do with daily life. If you’re pure in daily life—compassionate and virtuous—they can tell from your movements.”

This ties into the depth of the art—something Ms. Lobjois has set out to explore and perfect.

“I don’t feel there is a roof, a top, in classical Chinese dance,” she said, noting that the deeper you go, the more there is. “You discover more, and if you just discovered something new, it’s actually another branch to another part. It keeps on going.”

She said with the art, “what you think is easy is actually the hardest. What I said earlier about the eyes and the heart—those details are actually very important. That makes the difference from other dances.”

She said that, likewise, with things that look difficult, “sometimes may not be that hard. You just need to practice. If you practice a lot, you can do anything.”

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