My little sister Katty is finishing up her last year of secondary school. For her senior dance performance, she had the idea of having the dance team do Yang Liping‘s Chinese contemporary classic 女兒國, ‘Country of Daughters’. They just performed this past weekend, and she sent me these lovely pictures (that’s her in the red hat!).

She worked so hard on this, from self-learning the difficult moves and then teaching the team, to ordering the outfits, to choreographing her lead part, to translating the powerful lyrics into English, to directing the stage look and feel. An immensely challenging project that she’s carried out so wonderfully. So proud!

It must have been quite something to see this dance, drawn from Yunnan province’s ethnic minorities and folk traditions, transplanted onto a Pennsylvania high school stage by such a diverse group of young women.