John Lam has spent his career moving between the stage, the classroom, and now the space in between.
The first Vietnamese American principal dancer at Boston Ballet, he spent twenty years performing before turning his attention to teaching, mentoring, and creating opportunities for other artists.
As an associate professor at Boston Conservatory at Berklee and founder of Lam Dance Works, Lam is someone who has thought deeply about what it means to give back.
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Interview with John Lam
‣ You went from being a dancer at Boston Ballet to shaping the next generation at Boston Conservatory at Berklee. Was that an easy transition?
It was an easy jump, I suppose. Just how things land and how things worked out in terms of when I was stepping away from Boston Ballet and what the next steps were. As you know, many dancers, when we make it into this high-level tier, this hierarchy, it’s like, what do you do with that afterwards?
You get to see other dancers go through it. It’s not taboo. We see dancers retire and we see them ask, what do they do next? I knew that while the clock was ticking, I needed to figure that out.
‣ The industry focuses so much on the new and upcoming. But we don’t often talk about the transition from being a high-profile principal to: “What does that next chapter of life look like”?
I’ve been able to curate what I want to do, and I think that’s been the most powerful nuance of realizing,
“Oh, I can curate what I want to do and not have to wait for someone else’s opinion to figure out what I should be doing.”
I think that’s why I also left Boston Ballet. It was not a sustainable schedule for my family. Nor was it artistically sustainable for me, because I was growing. We were redoing ballets. We were repeating ballets.
‣ When did you feel like the clock was ticking?
Dancing full time and managing and building a family with my husband was quite the juggle. I had my two boys and a family that I created, and we had our second son when I was 30.
But I manage, and I think that I love to multitask. And that is what brought me to getting my bachelor’s. We had this incredible partnership with Northeastern through Boston Ballet. And then after that, I figured, no one’s going to look at my bachelor’s degree, so I need a master’s. So I got a master’s.
‣ I can tell right here that this is the perfectionism of a ballet dancer.
And I realized, if I made it to the principal level and I have this incredible master’s degree, I need to make use of it.
I think it all comes down to how I was raised as a Vietnamese American. My culture does not take anything for granted. I came from nothing. My parents fled Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
Thinking about their lens, they came to America for survival. So, as a first-generation person, there’s this idea of:
My parents came here for survival for me to have a life. If I’m going to be able to have a life because of their survival being here, I should make the most of it.
‣ You hustle the way your parents had to. You get it done no matter what.
There’s no “What’s going to happen?” It’s going to happen. I just don’t know how.
That’s my mindset. When I look at something or have an idea, I ponder on it, and then I’m like, okay, I’m going to do it. Not, “Oh, this is a dream that I wish to happen. I don’t know how to do it.” I have a dream and I’m going to figure out how to do it.
If I run into lots of issues, mountains, I figure out how to build.
‣ My mother was first-generation Korean, and I’m just now unpacking all of this. To honor the people who came before you… it is a totally different mindset that you’re bringing to ballet than someone who grew up with every opportunity in front of them.
Absolutely. Because of how I was brought up, I was able to garner all the different relationships that I have. And because of those real relationships… it has allowed me to blossom into the career that I have now.
People gave me so much in my career as a young child and growing up, that I feel like I need to give back.
We look at the dance world, we look at the community. It’s not that big. We look at the different artistic leaders, the temperature of what’s being covered, what’s not being covered.
What I need to do is be impactful. How can I be impactful?
Being impactful is giving back but also in a manner of my lens rather than someone else’s lens.
‣ How important is it to see someone like yourself in an art form now that you are a leader in ballet? How important is it to see someone like you in an art that maybe you couldn’t imagine yourself belonging to once upon a time?
I think that is really important. I didn’t really have many people that I was looking up to who looked like me in the industry.
There were Asian women, and there were some Korean dancers. If you go to Europe, yes, but here in America, there were not a lot of Asian male dancers who were prominent.
It didn’t affect me. It was just something that I noticed. It didn’t make me feel like, “Oh, poor me.” It was just something that I looked at.
But now that I look back at what I’ve done, and that I’m proud of what I’ve done, I don’t know any other dancers specifically of my race. There are a lot of Korean, Chinese, Japanese dancers, but I don’t know any other Vietnamese American dancers.
‣ Looking back at four-, five-, six-, seven-, eight-, nine-, ten-year-old John, and how ballet has evolved, what goes through your mind when you think about where you are now?
That little kid back there just wanted to dance. He just wanted to dance, and that was it.
I came from an underserved community, and it was rough and tough, and there were no arts. I didn’t come from an educated family in the arts. This was something so vague and so odd.
Because my parents needed to make ends meet, the childcare center that offered these scholarship programs would literally drive me to my dance classes, provide me with a uniform, provide me with food, look after me, and drive me home. So this was three hours for my parents to be like, “Oh, it’s free. Okay, if it’s free, go.”
Because of that, I was able to be exposed to dance. I was a very shy child. I didn’t speak much. I was very to myself, kind of running away and hiding in a corner. That was my demeanor.
But dance allowed me to think, “Oh, this is another way of expressing myself without speaking.” I didn’t want to talk. I just wanted to move.
‣ So movement allowed you to speak.
The movement allowed me to speak.
Now, looking at myself and looking back, I’m like, wow. If I didn’t have important, vital people who surrounded me while I was going through that path, I’m not sure if my trajectory would have happened the way it happened.
Would my trajectory be different if I was forced to dance, if I was forced to go to certain ballet schools, to be trained a certain way? Or if my family saw racism in this “elitist industry”?
‣ When you got older, did your parents ever say, “John, look, we need you to go into the family business,” or encourage you toward something more traditional?
Absolutely. When I got my full scholarship to National Ballet School in Canada, that was when things got serious.
I told my mom, “They’re giving me a full ride. I’m one of the first North American dancers that they’re giving this opportunity to.”
And that’s when they were like, “Well, I think you should stay home. You should go to high school here and then go to college and be a doctor,” the typical safe thing. All my other family members were doing that, and I was the black sheep.
But I think the reason why my mom eventually let me go is because she always wanted to be a teacher, and she was not allowed to do that because Vietnamese women back then stayed at home. They made kids, and they stayed at home, and they cared for their husbands.
She brought up that story before I left and said, “I’m letting you go because I don’t want you to do what I did.”
I think that she realized that this art form was something bigger than I even understood, or bigger than what she understood. But she knew that it was a place where there was goodness.
‣ So you were the master of your fate at a very young age. You said, “I’m doing this,” and your parents supported you.
Yes. And then I met Mikko Nissinen, now the artistic director of Boston Ballet, when I was 13 while at school in Canada (it was a boarding school, so I stayed until I was 17). Prior to my graduation, he came to see my spring show and he said, “I want you to come to Boston Ballet to dance for me.”
I told my mom because I had always said I wanted to go to San Francisco Ballet. That was my dream company. She replied, “I think that you need to go with Boston Ballet. Just go and see.” Because there was Mikko, someone who believed in me.
I also believe in luck. I don’t think that you can just work really, really hard and have academic prowess. There has to be some sort of luck that comes with it. I think that luck comes with your relationship-building that happens early on. Nothing might happen in the next five or ten years, but maybe it comes back to you in strange ways.
I’m just very grateful. I’m very humbled by the process. I continue to learn.
‣ I want to rewind to Boston. You were there for 20 years. You were promoted to principal dancer in 2014. Two decades is a long time to learn about yourself.
What did you learn about yourself at Boston Ballet that maybe you wouldn’t have learned anywhere else?
I think my innate ability to transform choreography into storytelling without knowing that I was doing that.
I learned in those 20 years that I was able to take works and make them into my own without basically doing whatever I wanted and not doing what the choreography was asking me to do.
‣ Give me an example. A specific role.
Prodigal Son.
Balanchine’s Prodigal Son is not seen as an Asian man, first of all. The stager didn’t see an Asian man to do this. But Mikko was like, “You have to use my principal dancer. You’re going to do it.”
I was given the second night, Saturday night. So I was not opening-night cast. A reviewer came and reviewed all four casts. They pointed out that I was the most effective emotional chronicle of all four.
My superpower in my time there was that I was such a versatile dancer. I knew there were other principals who could come in and do Don Quixote, or good partnering, or solo work. I kind of just did everything.
I learned that I was like, “Oh, I can do that. I can do that. I can do that.”
I think that came with the mindset of, again, coming back to my heritage:
You always just want to be the solution. Don’t wait for something to happen.
‣ You’re saying things that, if I’m projecting, would have broken me a little. When someone is saying, “We don’t want an Asian dancer for this role,” I think for me that would have caused personal strife.
But you seem to take that as, “I’m going to push even harder.” And then the review comes out. Tell me about that.
When you talk about it in that context, there were many situations that were not in my favor. What kept driving me was that I knew – maybe just how I was taught and how I was treated as a young dancer – but I was always taught that I was a rarity. That I carried something that was special.
Everyone carries something very special, but because of the people who were in my life, they kept informing me that I need to take care of this. Keep taking care of it, because it will be snatched away, trampled over, and tried to be ripped away from you.
I keep remembering that fire.
‣ You seemed to take a lot in stride.
I think that was my take on things. I did take things personally, but I would grieve about it privately, on my own at home. Then the next day, I would let it go, because there was nothing I could control.
‣ You are an Asian American man in an art form whose classical canon is overwhelmingly European and white. How do you navigate that?
I don’t think that I need to be defined by the fact that I’m an Asian dancer. I’m an artist who happens to be Vietnamese American.
‣ What was your favorite role to perform?
I do think the Prodigal Son was one of those roles, and I think it was because of the context and also where I was in my life. It was closer to the end of my career. I knew it was getting close, and it was a storyline of a prodigal son: he defied his family, left, and then came back for forgiveness.
I was able to really anchor into that storyline, into what my life was like, where I left home at 15, and then I’m coming back. I continue to come back every year for my family.
It just became such a powerful experience for me and for others who were around me – my director, the dancers, the stager, the ballet masters. They would come crying. I think it was just a very moving show and performance and experience for me, and I truly believed in it. That helped them believe in it.
So I would say that’s one of my favorite roles.
‣ You performed for extraordinary audiences over the course of your career. Was there a person or performance, aside from Prodigal Son, that you’ll remember for the rest of your life?
There were three instances.
We did a show in Boston, and our governor and our senator were there, so that was kind of cool.
Then we were in D.C. at the Kennedy Center. Caroline Kennedy came backstage. My friend Kathleen and I were doing Symphony in Three Movements, and she came to see that show. And then Maurice Béjart came to see me dance Melancholic in The Four Temperaments. That was so amazing. He was such an iconic choreographer, and just being able to be in the space with him… and since he then passed away, I just remember him being so gracious and kind to me about my performance.
The last one was at the New York State Theater where I was the principal in Symphony in Three Movements. Peter Martins came to see that show. New York City Ballet dancers did not have, at the time, a principal Asian male. I thought that was a pinnacle for me as an Asian man. I was like, okay, I’m here in New York, I’m dancing on that stage, and I’m a principal. It was a huge moment.
‣ Did you know how significant this moment was for you as it was happening?
I felt that, but no one else did. I just knew personally. I was like, this is an incredible thing that’s happening right now. At the time, we didn’t know what was happening. It was just a very poignant time that he got to see an Asian male do that. He had seen so many people do it, and not Asian male dancers.
I can’t control other people’s opinions about me. I can’t control if people like me or not. But what I can control is my ability to dance.
And the reason why I dance is because I love it, and no one’s going to take that away from me.
Featured Image of John Lam in Yury Yanowsky’s Subject 41 presented by Lam Dance Works. Photo by Karolina Kuras.
