Some paper said shared activities like dancing help students form and maintain friendships. So I came up the idea of whether collaborative dancing could help people who haven’t met before to build friendship.
I messaged some course mates and invited them to the workshop, and when I got their reply for coming or not, I secretly asked the same amount (in fact is only 1) of my friends as the “stranger” to my course mate, to test whether dancing could engage cross-cultural people. However, as I said, I asked only one stranger (thanks to Arnold), which means I got only one course mate (thanks to Yung), unluckily, they both are Chinese.
Anyways, we had a good time during the workshop. It was also fun for me to instruct absolute beginner.
So the response for me from Yung was, he was afraid to dance with a stranger (especially I didn’t tell him about this before), but when they started to talk, he was not that nervous about stranger. And he thought the personalities of the people in the circumstance are quite important, because my friend Arnold was also outgoing as Yung, they can easily start to talk to each other.
And from the less response from my course mates, I think I set the target wrongly. My targets should be those who already love dancing but never trying to engage with people from different culture.
My next step is already planned, for this Thursday. I asked two of my dancing mates, one is Chinese and one is non-Chinese, and ask them to bring me some friends from their culture.
I went to Paris on 22nd Sep to take part in a KPOP random play dance event, and that was my first time to travel abroad to do what I like. I went there with 3 course mates. After the YouTuber uploaded the video, I posted some comment which related to my project and got some feedback to my comment.
From the comments you can see that, some people around the world know me from what I did when I was in China. They know that, “oh, this girl is from Chinese random play dance organisation, now she is study in the UK.”
The Korean comment was saying “She is famous in Shanghai’s KPOP RPD, now she is studying in the UK and then travel to France to take part in this RPD. To some extent, this is the biggest achievement for KPOP, right?”
To some extent, this related to my project. The YouTuber “created a community” which is for KPOP fans, dancers and some YouTube viewers. The community is under his channel, or let’s say it is his channel. He held these events to gather people who have connection to the community, such as me. Then, me, as a representative from a Chinese community, jumped into the international one, with some people knew and some people didn’t know me before, (I think) I am like the uncertainty, to break some existing circle, to connect the Chinese community with the international one.
I said “connect”, just because I think, nowadays, it is very difficult for Chinese people to come out and participate in such events. And because of the Covid pandemic, the famous Chinese isolation policy, some non-Chinese people will build higher cultural barrier inside their heart. Furthermore, because Chinese government build the wall to ban Chinese people from using YouTube, sometimes we cannot see directly what other people think about us, which will also build their stereotype.
So I think, what I did is like a break and connection between the two community.
1st Negotiation with the “gate keeper”
On 14th Oct I reached out to one of the manager of the dance club of the Chinese students association in UAL face to face. I had a small talk with her about the plan of gathering the KPOP team in dance club and our dance club. However, she refused my advice, with the reason of “if I use the club to do my project, people will copy me and do what as I do” and “there is no slot for me to do this in campus’s activity room”.
To some extent, I think her reasons are reasonable, but not that much. However, just because I got Covid last week, I was not that smart to negotiate with her about this.
David mentioned about the word “gate keeper”, and encouraged me to negotiate with her once more, to see if there is difference with the result of the intervention.
Travel to Barcelona
Last weekend I travelled to Barcelona alone to take part in another random play dance event, alone, wow. I have no knowledge of Spanish (maybe hola), no friends there, and I never travelled to Spain, and my parents don’t know I was so crazy.
What I did was, I searched for some Chinese students in Barcelona who is going to the dance event through the Chinese social media, and luckily I found a girl and her friend (well, they are 6 and 7 years younger than me….). I asked them to be my guide, and I said I would teach them how to dance for return.
On the day of the event, we had a small workshop in the gym of my hotel in Barcelona, then we went to the place.
Then for the video and the comments.
The comments were as usual, and I was really impressed by the one who said “You’re an inspiration for the K-POP community!”
But this time I found a comment that might related to the project.
The Korean comment was saying “You are not Chinese… You are Korean, I hate China.”
Actually I am a person who does not like to reply these kind of comment, because I think that will make me be in a storm, but this time I think I need to reply to him/her, because I think it is what I want to do to clean the stereotype, to lower the cultural barrier, even though I have no idea of why this viewer commented like that. The difficulty was I think I cannot only say “Don’t say that” or “No”, I think I need to say those mildly. And I am so happy to see that there is a like when I made this screenshot.
Funny supplement to this:
I talked about this with David, David encouraged me like, “he said he hate China, not Chinese, not you, right? Is this the same as maybe you like K-Pop but you do not like Korea?”
Based on the new question and new intervention idea, I created a dancing workshop as an intervention. I sent the call-out announcement in the course’s WhatsApp group chat.
Although some classmates replied to this message, no one came to this workshop.
To reflect on this, I think the reasons why they didn’t come are:
they are not interested in dancing (or KPOP dancing), so they don’t wanna spend time on this. (From Xueqing’s feedback to this, always). As my previous experience, people who are interested in KPOP are more likely to be Asian and black people, but my classmates are mainly white people so…..maybe!
Rishkandha said she’s too shy to dance, and it is the problem that people will have.
The time I set was during the working time in weekdays, and maybe E14 is quite far so people don’t wanna come.
People in the course are not that familiar with me, so maybe they don’t think they need to help me. (not blame on this, this is just some thing with common sense?)
Got the info from my classmates just now, they thought it was this week not last week.
Carrie said I need to DM everyone, because she wants to come but she doesn’t read the message from WhatsApp.
My question is started with, How can dancing community gather cross-cultural dancers together to help build sense of belonging and collectivism?
Then change to How can dancing gather people together to play with the help a community.
David mentioned based on my intervention idea: How dance help with group dynamic bonding
Intervention additional advice from David: Bring one of their friend, interview the friend I don’t know right after the session, would you do again, generate the data from classmates and interview from friends, with the same question. Video interview is qualitative method
I still need some Academic argument
Hypothesis is made of 2 parts, I need the anti ideas.
Background supplement of the new research question
Let’s start with my background.
I have been dancing K-Pop dancing for 12 years since the first time in 2010. I have always been the dancing leader and producer of K-Pop dancing club during my undergraduate period. At the same time, I have been a member of the dance crew in the largest K-Pop Random Play Dance organization in Chinese Mainland since 2019.
Since I came to Britain at the end of last year, I have left my original dancing crew. At first, I didn’t have any new friends in London, nor did the UAL have a suitable society for me to join, so I searched many local K-Pop dance crews in London on social media, followed their instagrams, and kept in touch with some of them. I even participated in a 30 minute interview with a dance group called Segno (https://www.instagram.com/segno_official/), which lasted longer than any of my previous internship interview. Although I failed to pass the interview, I continued to follow to the dance group.
After a period of time, I learned that every CSSA (Chinese Student and Scholars Association) in London has its own dance team, and most people, especially people from Chinese Mainland, do not choose to join the kind of dance club that everyone (means people from all over the world) joins.
By May this year, when I gradually learned more about the K-Pop dance environment in London, I found that I mostly danced with foreigners, while most of my Chinese friends only danced with Chinese people, but I didn’t ask why.
The first time I showed up in front of London people or the outside world should be the MCM Comic con in London at the end of May. When AZIZA dance crew uploaded their random play dance I participated in to YouTube, some foreign audiences recognized me. This YouTube viewer named Maknae was the first to recognize me. Although he didn’t know my name, he knew I was from China.
Maknae： The one with white short sleeved shirt tie is the one often seen in China’s K-POP random dance, went to the UK ah ha;; You know a lot of dances, and your strength is still good~
I: Wow, someone actually recognized me.
Maknae： Wow, you also have a personal channel, and you can speak Korean! I have seen many times in K-POP random dance in China before Because your dance is very good, so I remember, you are still very beautiful, and the dance is also very handsome~
I: I started using YouTube because I came to Britain Korean… just a little kkkk Thank you for recognizing me!!
Maknae： You like K-Pop, Korean people should say thank you. It seems that you are studying in the UK~Come on!!
Many people may know that I was going through a super sad broken up at that time, so I was very encouraged and cheered after seeing such comments.
It is precisely because of my active performance in London and Manchester that the foreign audience of YouTube found that this dancer who is very active in China went to the UK to study. Their feedback made these Local Crews in London also pay attention to me.
But the premise is that I am an excellent dancer, and I have the courage to stand in front of the world because I am excellent. If a person is not as excellent as I am, and has no desire as I am, they will not take the initiative and have the courage to stand in front of so many people.
In fact, until this time, I haven’t changed my research direction to the current one, and I’m still struggling in my last topic.
During the summer vacation, many of my friends returned to China because of the end of the semester. I can probably perceive from the photos they sent that they are still with Chinese friends in London. People are easily influenced by people around them. If people around them choose to return to China, then the probability of one of them returning is extremely high. A week before my friends left China, I invited them to my home and watched some local London Crew videos together.
They just encouraged me to dance with these people, but when I asked them why they didn’t choose to dance with these people, they said, “It’s unnecessary.”
Change my topic
Until September this year, I happened to know that a Korean YouTube GoToe (https://www.youtube.com/@gotoe) with two million fans was coming to Paris to hold a random play dance. It happened that Xueqing and I were also planning to go to Paris (thanks to God), so we put this activity to our travelling schedule, which became our last trip before Term 3 started.
After this video was uploaded, more people recognized me, while I commented as “Hi, I’m from China’s random play dance organization.”
At that time, I suddenly realized that almost all the other Chinese who often dance with foreigners are those who have stayed in London for a long time, not the people like me. So why am I the only new comer who has been dancing with foreigners since the beginning? Because I had no friends when I first came to London, I took the initiative to find some local people or local communities to join. I wonder if I can help those foreign students who are new to London to find suitable groups.
So I finally determined my theme in Term 3. After several revisions, it became: How can dancing community gather cross-cultural dancers together to help build sense of belonging and collectivism?
It is the final new question, and at that time, it was still not the question for now.
