The Philadelphia Orchestra’s China anniversary in North Carolina — Q&A with Alison Friedman

The difference between propaganda and art is that “propaganda has an agenda to tell you what to think,” whereas art “takes you on an emotional journey where you feel something about a situation whether or not you agree with the message.”

This is according to Alison Friedman, who ran a company that brought international arts — including American theater like the play The Pentagon Papers — to China, and took Chinese artists all over the world. She’s now the James and Susan Moeser Executive and Artistic Director for Carolina Performing Arts in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In that capacity she has programmed the Philadelphia Orchestra for two concerts on September 20 and 21 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of its groundbreaking tour to China.

The Philadelphia Orchestra’s 1973 trip was one of the major events that led to rapprochement between the U.S. and China, culminating in the establishment of diplomatic relations on January 1, 1979.

I talked to Alison in August about U.S.-China cultural exchanges, the Philadelphia Orchestra, her experiences as a cross-cultural arts promoter, the American South, and more.

I must at this point disclose that Alison is a dear old friend of mine, and that one of the works the Philadelphia Orchestra will perform in Chapel Hill was composed by my wife.

Below is an abridged, edited transcript of our conversation.

—Jeremy Goldkorn

I think we first met at Vibes nightclub in Beijing’s 798 Art District in 2003?

We were standing on the second floor looking down at the crowd, making small talk about the people dancing below us.

You were on a Fulbright, studying Chinese contemporary dance? How did you get there? And how did you get to where you are now?

I had always been interested in languages and international relations. And I always loved the performing arts but thought never the twain shall meet. The world is always telling you to choose: academics, or business, or politics, or the arts.

The Fulbright allowed me to combine these halves of my life, to go to China and combine my academic interest in Chinese language and culture and international relations with my personal passion for dance and theater and music. So I enrolled both at Peking University in the history department, as well as at the Beijing Dance Academy.

As you know, the more you learn about China, the more you realize you will never know.

Ha!

After the Fulbright ended, I wanted to stay, so I worked in various capacities — I was a DJ for China Radio International, working with different arts organizations, and with the composer Tán Dùn 谭盾.

I realized what I loved wasn’t just great art for art’s sake, it was how the arts can show sides of countries and cultures that you don’t see through the press, through business or politics.

This was in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, of course. I went on my Fulbright in 2002, and Beijing got the Olympic bid in 2001. So the city was alive with potential, with possibility — and with access to the world. My parents in Washington, D.C. could read something about China in the Washington Post every day, and I could get Starbucks in Beijing. Those things weren’t wrong about each other, but they were incomplete. Starbucks doesn’t tell the whole story of America. The articles my parents were reading in the Washington Post weren’t the full picture of this incredibly complex society and country and culture.

Performing arts can show nuance, can show contradiction, complexity. That was the inspiration to start my own company, Ping Pong Productions, whose mission was bringing China and the world together through the performing arts. So we toured Chinese dance, theater, and music abroad, and international dance, theater, and music throughout China. For us, success was when an audience saw something from China and their view of the country had to get just a little bit bigger, to make room for something they hadn’t originally considered as part of their perception which was usually defined by business, politics, and mass media. I ran that company for eight years, bringing Chinese artists to more than 50 different countries on five continents, and bringing international artists to more than 25 cities across China.

Aside from the numbers, I think the glory days were 2011 and 2013, when I toured the play about the Pentagon Papers. The return tour was in 2013, and it was the first American theater company to perform at the National Center for Performing Arts (NCPA) in Beijing.

How did it go down in China?

With the first tour in 2011, we did post show talks with lawyers and journalists about the issues raised. We had so much feedback along the lines of, “I always just assumed Americans thought freedom of the press was good and censorship bad. But now I see you guys have some messy issues over there, too.”

The “show, don’t tell” nature of the arts is effective because it doesn’t bludgeon you over the head. This is the difference between propaganda and art. Propaganda has an agenda to tell you what to think, and art — the kind that I like — takes you on an emotional journey where you feel something about a situation whether or not you agree with the message.

But then you moved to Hong Kong?

In 2017, I was recruited to be artistic director of West Kowloon Cultural District, the largest arts and cultural development in the world, building multiple performing arts centers, museums, and big outdoor public park spaces. I was there for four years, and then decided after all this time in China, I should actually learn a little filial piety and be closer to my parents as they approached their 80s. So I had the good fortune of going from China to Carolina, to work at Carolina Performing Arts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in North Carolina.

For those unfamiliar, UNC – Chapel Hill is the oldest public university in the country, right?

Right.

Let’s fast-forward to now and what’s going on with the Philadelphia Orchestra. You’re in the American South, you’re in the old heartland of slave-owning tobacco farmers, among the wealthy elite of America, and you’re bringing an orchestra that’s commemorating Sino-U.S. exchange at a time when nobody wants to hear good news about that.

Correct!

The concerts we’re doing are 50 years to the day of their closing concerts in Beijing from the tour of September 20 and 21, 1973.

At the behest of then President Richard Nixon, the Philadelphia Orchestra went to Beijing under the direction of Eugene Ormandy, who was maestro at the time. It was the first American orchestra to perform in China. This was when Henry Kissinger and Nixon were working on reestablishing Sino-U.S. diplomatic relations. It came right on the heels of ping-pong diplomacy, with the exchange of ping-pong athletes.

The orchestra has been back to China 11 times since 1973, most recently in 2019, right before COVID. They’ve toured, they’ve done workshops. They do lots of projects in educational institutions, and civic settings.

So we have an opportunity now 50 years later. I’m intentionally not calling it a celebration, but rather a commemoration, because a celebration assumes a perspective. With a commemoration, you instead recognize an important moment, and then you have an opportunity to look at it from different angles.

For example, where were U.S.-China relations 50 years ago, and where are they now? I am not a political scientist or historian, but I am on a campus full of them. So there’s an opportunity to engage faculty and students in wider discussions, not only about our relationship, but also about the role that people-to-people exchanges can play, the role the arts can play in reminding all of us that not everybody is of one, monolithic perspective or political identity.

What is the concept of the concert?

They’re doing two performances. One is of their current repertory featuring violinist David Kim, and the other is the commemoration of the 50th anniversary. The commemoration is in two parts. It opens with Wú Fēi’s 吴非 Hello Gold Mountain, and it closes with Beethoven’s Sixth, which was the main piece featured in the 1973 tour.

We were very intentional about working with the orchestra on the repertoire, because if this is truly about people-to-people exchanges, the most impactful stories you hear about the tour 50 years ago aren’t about all of the grandstanding and the pomp and circumstance of concerts. It was when the musicians from the orchestra actually spent some time at places like the Central Conservatory of Music. They played with Chinese musicians and went to the markets where they could buy Chinese instruments like erhu and dizi.

Two musicians who were on the 1973 tour are still in the orchestra and will be here: Davyd Booth, violin; and Renard Edwards, viola. That’s profound lineage. They’ll be doing some talks about their experiences.

They must be in their 70s or 80s?

Yes, and a reminder that all of this is still relatively recent history, within one lifetime!

What are you hoping will come out of this? Obviously, you want to engage people in a creative act and hope that they go home and process it in meaningful ways. But since you spent so much of your life in China and have a deep personal and professional connection to the country, what are you hoping to achieve with these concerts?

Given the rising tensions, anything that humanizes China is of vital importance right now. I hope that there’s an element of this that audiences take away.

Another thing is that here in the Research Triangle [Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill] the global diversity of people from Asia, and of people who work for corporations like Google, Apple, and Lenovo, make it a hub of a global region that doesn’t quite think of itself that way yet.

So I want to celebrate these things, and help nudge that self-perception of this area as having a profoundly diverse, global population that isn’t going anywhere.

I think the South generally suffers, both inside America and internationally, from a perception based on stereotypes that portray it as backward, when, in fact, it’s a very complex and cosmopolitan part of the world.

I think many geographical areas, whether the American South or China, get boiled down to simplified stereotypes when in reality they are, as you said, complex and bustling with growth.

One of the reasons that I didn’t leave China for so long is it felt like you were at the center of the action. Beijing was vibrant and had a sense of being where history was happening, especially in that lead-up to the Olympics and just after. Now, to a certain degree, I have that same feeling in the American South. People are grappling with the history here while simultaneously trying to figure out what our future is. There’s a creative, self-reflective energy that reminds me a little of Beijing 20 years ago.

That existential transition moment is really quite thrilling, and to have it happening in a place with so many universities and the fourth-highest concentration of Ph.D.’s in the country is rife with potential.

All right, last question: What’s the best Chinese restaurant in the Research Triangle?

One of my favorite hotpot restaurants is called So Hot, in the town of Cary.