The key to helping Taiwanese students overcome shyness is to use lots of encouragement and humor, said Michael Parks Masterson, an acclaimed US performer and hip hop dance instructor at this year’s American Performing Arts Academy program in Taipei.
“I encourage the students a lot and sometimes even use reverse psychology to get them to do what I ask,” he said yesterday, adding that the Taiwanese dance students he met were almost always able to step up to his demands.
This is Masterson’s second trip to Taiwan to teach at the academy, which has returned to Taiwan after a successful first visit in 2006.
Compared with the students two years ago, Masterson said that participants this year were “faster and smarter,” as a group of eight dancers demonstrated at the press conference after only two hours of practice.
Another academy instructor and well-known American pianist John Ferguson praised the students, calling them “talented and hardworking.”
He said that many classically trained young Taiwanese pianists tell him that their teachers try to discourage them from playing jazz piano because “it’s bad for their fingers.”
“The thing is, anything is bad for you if the techniques are bad,” he said, adding that one of the things students would learn at the piano academy was how to play the instrument in a more percussive style.
Cheng Wen-wen (鄭雯文), a classically trained pianist of 16 years from Penghu, said although jazz piano is very different from what she was used to, “I am excited to learn all varieties of music, especially from good teachers.”
Some hip hop dance students said that even though they only had Masterson as a teacher for two days, they would sign up for the course next year if he comes back.
“Masterson’s style is not mainstream hip hop, but more jazzy and old-school,” said Kenny Kuo (郭文瀚), a high school senior.
“We might have been shy at first, but we have no problem getting all hyper and excited,” said another hip hop student, Tiziano Hsieh (謝念羽). “The bottom line is, if you can’t get hyper, then get off the dance floor.”
Students from the hip hop and piano academy will put on a free concert on Friday night.
The Broadway academy students will perform next Saturday with excerpts from Guys and Dolls, Rent and others musicals.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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