In the documentary Dancing with the Dead: Red Pine and the Art of Translation, Bill Porter, whose pen name is Red Pine, explains that his work as a renowned translator of Chinese poetry is about listening more than anything else. “When you translate poetry, of course, you don’t translate the words. You translate something behind the words,” Red Pine says in the film. Longtime filmmaker Ward Serrill had a similar experience when he directed and edited Dancing with the Dead. “I was continuously attempting to get behind the words to tell the story,” Serrill says. 

Serrill, who, like Red Pine, lives in Port Townsend, Washington, has been making films for twenty-five years. One of his first films, a documentary, The Heart of the Game, which was narrated by rapper and actor Ludacris, earned critical acclaim for its story of a girls’ high school basketball team in Seattle. While wrapping up a recent documentary on five master bowmakers in the Pacific Northwest, Serrill’s producer asked him if he would be interested in profiling another local legend. “Heck yeah,” Serrill said, thus beginning a four-year project that traces Red Pine’s life and work, with moving reflections on his childhood and emotional, lyrical presentations of his translations, sung by singer and artist Spring Cheng.

Read an interview with Serrill below and watch the film as part of Tricycle’s Film Club this February. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Why did you want to make this film? Robert Altman, a filmmaker and one of my mentors, once said, “I only do films I don’t know how to do.” That was so true with Red Pine, because literary films, to me, are the hardest to make. You’re making a film about something that’s ephemeral and referentially abstract: language. What does language mean, and how do you portray writing? The process that the writer is going through, you can’t see. So I said yes because I had no idea how to do it. 

You’ve written that you had an experience in high school that made this film feel like a full-circle moment. Can you describe that? The story echoed something that took me way back to when I was in high school and an English teacher introduced me to Lao Tzu and Taoism. It was the only thing that made sense to me as a teenager, which is ironic, because it’s built on paradox, but it made sense to me in a strange way. And later I went to Alaska to seek a kind of solitude in the wilderness, which reminded me of these Chinese mountain hermits that Bill talks about. So here was a film about Zen poetry, the tao, and the search for Chinese mountain hermits, and I felt well-suited to take it on, even though I had no idea how to do it.

Can you tell me more about your time in Alaska, and the kinship you felt with the mountain hermits of China? I found a place up there that looked like a wizard’s hut. It was a house on the ocean, by a waterfall, and I was able to live there and really explore a naive young person’s interest in deep solitude and the wilderness. It was sponsored by a deep need in me to understand who the heck I was because I came to Alaska in my early 20s, completely confounded by what I was supposed to be and who I was, coming from, to me, a very fractured culture and family life. I wanted to get to something. What that something was, I didn’t know. It was probably as simple as the search for inner happiness—some kind of peace amidst the chaos that I was feeling inside. Being in nature made complete sense and drew me into a state of quietness and stillness that I couldn’t find around people.

The journey got a lot more difficult, as anyone who’s attempted an interior life will find out, or has found out. Here comes all the pain and conditioning and all that stuff. So I think I went deeper into sources like Zen and Taoism that seemed to be pointing to a place that had an answer to this chaos, and it had more and more to do with presence and just being here.

How does Dancing with the Dead differ from other films you’ve made? One major thing was making a film about literature that’s visual . . . there was an intent there to not just put the poems on the screen but to try to make them experiential, so that people might go on the journey of the poem a little bit.

What was it like getting to know Red Pine? I find him a fascinating human. He’s very much as he is in the film, as if you’d be having tea with him. Getting to know him on camera was one thing, and that was really delightful. The other thing I’d say about Bill is he has a certain steadiness and good cheer. I was with him for four years, through ups and downs and challenging circumstances that happened while we were traveling. Watching his response to those things, there’s just this kind of steadiness there that I imagine comes from a lifetime as a serious practitioner. Because underlying it all, he’s a serious practitioner.

Can you tell me more about the singing and the lyrical presentations of the poems in the film? Why was it so important to you to present them the way you did? As Bill says and demonstrates in the film, these poems are meant to be sung. One of the first things I tried was actually having Bill sing all the poems in the film, and that just didn’t work. There was something missing, and eventually I realized it was having a feminine presence and wisdom and generosity and power in the film.

After a year of having trouble finding a singer, you found one serendipitously. Can you explain how you connected with the singer? One of my practices is a dance form called contact improv, and when I was just finishing up with editing, I was at a workshop on Orcas Island. There was an open mic one night, and I wasn’t that interested in it. I was sitting outside, just looking at the garden, while people inside were performing skits and songs and poetry. Then I heard this woman stand up and say, “Many of you know that I am Chinese-born, but few of you know that my mission in life has become to sing the poems of ancient China back into the world.” A shiver ran up my spine, and I found myself standing, magnetized, inside the tent. That’s when I met Spring Cheng, who sang this song that really floored all of us in terms of its emotional qualities and content.

When I asked her if she would consider singing the poems in the film, she said, “What you’re talking about is the fulfillment of a lifetime dream for me.” She said the old poetry literally saved her life. She had a very traumatic, difficult childhood in China during the Cultural Revolution, and even at age 8, was thinking of ending her life. She found solace and hope through this ancient poetry that she was reading.

She has a PhD in molecular biology, has been a cancer researcher, and had her own acupuncture clinic. But about five years ago, she really started to practice songs. So she came to Port Townsend, and she had composed the melodies for the poems that she sings in the film. Then she said, “Oh, you know I have this other one that I’ve recorded.” And when I listened to it, I started to cry and realized, well, that’s the song I’ll use for the ending credits.

It’s a beautiful documentary, and a beautiful ending. At the very end of a screening, especially if audiences know that the filmmakers are present, sometimes people will clap. With this film, at the end it’s completely silent through all the credits. It’s the best applause in the world for this film.

♦

Visit redpinemovie.com to learn about other ways to watch, including a special program for Zen centers to host screenings.