Скачать или смотреть PODCAST: Yuan Yuan Tan Returns: From the Buddha's Coin Toss to Lady White Snake

In This Edition:


-Podcast interview with Yuan Yuan Tan


-Notes on the complexities of artistic exchange and the new work Lady White Snake.





Yuan Yuan Tan, San Francisco’s great ballerina, almost never became a dancer. Her entire career was decided by a single coin toss. Arguing about whether or not she’d be allowed to study such an impractical pursuit as ballet, her parents said, “The Buddha will decide.” A coin was thrown. It landed in dance’s favor, and her fate was sealed.

Now, 40 years after the Buddha’s coin toss, Tan has been a pillar on American ballet stages for three decades. It was under her tenure—and Helgi Tomasson’s artistic direction—that San Francisco Ballet became one of the best companies in the world.

Tan recently retired from San Francisco Ballet and, not missing a beat, is already the artistic director of Suzhou Ballet. Separately, she is directing and co-producing an inventive and spectacular ballet, Lady White Snake (https://www.davidhkochtheater.com/tic...) , coming to Lincoln Center on July 26 & 27. (https://www.davidhkochtheater.com/tic...) Blending Chinese classical dance, Kung Fu, contemporary dance, and ballet, it tells an ancient fairy tale that, like all myths, is surprisingly relevant to our modern experience. The projections are immersive and explosive, wrapping subconscious archetypes within a story of inner conflict—the tension between what we want and what’s expected of us.

Artistic and cultural exchange is always important, but sometimes it’s event more pointed and urgent.
We have many examples in history, particularly during the Cold War, when the arts—music and dance in particular—were used as cudgels of soft power. Great jazz musicians (funded by the CIA) traveled to the Soviet Union; New York City Ballet and Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet toured each other’s homelands. Perhaps these tours were meant to flex each country’s assertion that their society was superior, that their cultural and intellectual development would lead humanity forward, eclipsing other economies and philosophies. But what’s left in our collective memory is the beauty of the work—the windows opened to one another’s talents and rare gifts, the knowing that through the arts we connect above space, time, and government tension.


These exchanges bore tangible fruit. The Kennedy Center—America’s national theater—and Lincoln Center, art’s temple in the middle of the country’s cultural heart, were born of Cold War competition with the Soviets. Even if it’s a pity that they arose from jostling for perceived superiority, the creation of these theaters has elevated what we’ve been able to experience and develop artistically—and the way we see ourselves.





Now, over half a century later, history in its cycles and rhymes is again asking us to face ourselves, our systems, each other.


And once again, it is through the arts that we may find a shared language. Yuan Yuan Tan’s Lady White Snake arrives not just as a performance, but as a bridge—between East and West, past and present, tradition and reinvention. In an age of fractures and firewalls, such works remind us that the most resonant forms of communication still come through beauty, discipline, and story.


Listen to the podcast to hear Tan’s journey—from a coin toss in Shanghai to center stage in San Francisco, and now to the helm of an international ballet production—mirroring the very ideals Lady White Snake embodies: resilience, transformation, and the enduring power of choice.


Perhaps the Buddha's coin was always going to land this way.








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