Lay Zhang: You can laugh at me, but don’t laugh at hard-working

The morning we met with Lay Zhang, he was preparing for the filming of “Street Dance of China 3” latest stage performance, the first show for the four contestant teams led by their own team captains.

Lay accidentally twisted his ankles during practice the night before, he was then sent to the hospital for urgent care but was still having a hard time walking with his support brace on.

“But I probably will forget about it when I get on stage, I don’t know, just try my best I guess.” Lay faces his upcoming filming with the “Let’s do this!” attitude as always.

“Street Dance of China 3” allows the audience to feel the power of passion. The dedication of the four captains and their professionalism in street dance have even made some audience change their prejudices and stereotypes about idols.

The spirit of street dance is about love, peace and respect. How about Lay’s spirit? His answer was: gratitude, hard-working, and making good choices.

“Hard-working” has become a label that follows him closely since his rise to fame.

To deliver a mind-blowing and eye-popping street dance performance, hard-working is required on and off stage. But for Lay, ‘hard-working’ did not bring him just recognition, but also mocking.

Breaking the prejudice

Lay has made a metaphor that said: Music is water to me, whereas films and TV shows are soda.

Now he has extended this metaphor: “Dancing is a self-defense weapon, maybe it can even be a nuclear weapon.”

In the latest hit “Street Dance of China 3”, Lay has drawn his own weapon.

The cypher battle in episode 2 by the four captains is probably one of the most trended performance in SDC 3.

In a total of four battle rounds with freestyle and unlimited variety of dances, Lay has performed cap trick and multiple connection techniques. After the battle, he laid on the ground wheezing, feeling unable to disengage from that first experience of battle that he described as “ nerve wrecking, exciting and awesome.”

Cap trick is one of the tricks that Lay had practiced before. Professional dancers always prepare set of combos like this. They may use it at the beginning of the battle, but Lay opted for a crescendo battle rhythm, and brought out the big guns at the very end.

Now recalling the battle, Lay said his idea was simple,” Dance to the fullest and win the battle. Freestyle really relies on everyday accumulation.”

In this battle which was acclaimed as “ Top Level” by contestants, Lay won the final victory.

Yibo Wang said,” Lay really surprised me, and you can really see how hard he had practiced.” Professional dancer Wentao Yang commented, “Lay’s Krump can place in professional krump competitions. It has blown us to pieces.”

“SDC3” art director/professional dancer Jun Fang described that Lay radiates when he dances. In technical terms, his form is very good. Pictures can be taken at any angle and he’ll still look perfect.” It takes relentless training that many underground dancers can’t even do it.”

Lay was already one of the best dancers in his band. But when he was a trainee, he self-evaluated that his dancing was unsystematic, his singing was mediocre, and he had no other talents. He was one who scored 20 out of 100 for every subject. Later, he unknowingly picked dancing as a breakthrough and focused all his energy on it. He realized that he could actually get 95 or even 100 points at dancing. This was when his perception of himself changed.

With dancing as his weapon, Lay fought his way out twice: once as a trainee when he danced himself from the underground training room to the big stage, and many years after he rose to stardom where his krumping has become the proof of his capability.

It wasn’t until Lay’s filming of his new song “LIT’s” MV that he began to study systematically with his teacher from the basics. Krumping originated from clowning and was created to vent emotions and to prevent fights, which Lay thought was pretty cool. “In fact, there’s a quite frenzied and hysterical side in me. And of course, krumping is wild. I hope everyone can get wild in their own life track.”

At the night after the cypher battle filming, the show director Wei Lu had hot pot with the four captains. Before the dinner, Wei Lui found that Lay has chatted with Yibo Wang for a while. Their topic was not about the victory or defeat of that battle, but about the ways to promote the minority dance types such as Krump and to give more performance stages to these dance types. Why is the Krump development in China not that successful as outside of China? Their conclusion is that good krumpers are all from overseas, and meanwhile these excellent dancers are rarely coming to China to train dancers. The krumping lovers in China can only learn it by themselves through videos.

Lay and TightEyez, the founder of Krump, followed each other on social media on the day of filming the fire stage show. Lay had a conversation with him through the phone and invited him to come to China to meet with more Chinese krumpers. Lay also hopes to hold krump sessions in China. He also hopes that with his influence, he can encourage more youngsters to join street dance. Street dance has been included into the Olympic Games events list, Lay hopes that he can see these younger people winning the glory for their country in 2024 Olympic Games.

He has proven himself not only in this show but has also taken on the responsibility as a street dance promoting ambassador. Lay said that hopefully he can break the prejudice to the idol industry.

‘Actually, there are many idols who are talented, such as Yibo and Jackson, they did quite good in dancing. We are all idols and doing really good in dancing. I think the prejudice needs to be broken with time and works. So I hope that I can provide more good pieces of work to the public, and also hope that public can be more fair to the idol industry. There will be more great idols waiting for you to find.

Respect hard working

In recent years, Lay has done lots of works in many fields, such as music, variety shows, filming etc.

Currently, he is filming the new Daylight Entertainment produced TV drama “Challenged At Midlife” as well as “Street Dance of China 3”. His normal routine is basically filming in the daytime, and dance practice every night after he’s off work. He only has 2 to 3 hours of sleep everyday. He describes this busy schedule as ‘I feel that I’m doing three days of workloads in one day.’

Time management is a big issue that Lay has to face every day. There was a big controversy when he held his computer in the airport to make music, but that because he was too busy, he had no other choice. “No one wants to make music walking at the airport. Listening to music, making music, and checking documents at the airport are all due to the lack of time. The scheduled dates for mastering and mixing were approaching, everything had to be pushed to meet the deadlines. Think about it, I was about to board the flight and it would take another few hours to land. If people have never experienced it, they wouldn’t understand the whole process of music making, so that’s fine with me.”

Facing with what the public has used to talk about him, Lay even put the words “white lotus”, “fake hard-work” on his personal documentary “REKNOWN” and faced those negativities directly.

When Lay’s hard-working has been ridiculed as some sort of engineered public persona, he did not waver, “I think working hard is a prerequisite for success, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to success. I think there’s something wrong with laughing at working hard. You can laugh at me, but don’t laugh at hard-working. Everyone who works hard is worthy of respect.”

The cypher battle allowed the audience to see the four captains giving their all. Lay said that he would do his best for almost every job.

Lay practiced dancing so much that his studio floor has been smashed. As the epidemic eased, his colleagues returned to the studio and found strange traces of dust on their tables. They went upstairs and discovered that it was Lay at the dance studio — he danced so hard the floor has been stomped to the extent ashes fell downstairs.

While Lay’s efforts in dancing had finally been recognized by professionals and seen by the audience, his hard work in other fields still awaits a better result. For example, singers of this generation are generally mired with their works “not reaching out from their fixed circles”. When the vertical market and fixed circles supersede mass communication, it becomes difficult to create a highly popular song.

According to Lay, “NAMANANA”, “Honey” and “LIT” all represent himself, “I don’t know if others recognize those songs or not”.

“I think that each era is faced with its own challenges. And if there are challenges, there are opportunities. When you see an opportunity, just try and work hard for it. If nothing come of it, no big deal. Maybe there’s another good era for music. Right now, we are the people cultivating the soil at the early stage. It’s like if there hadn’t been the hard work of the older generation of dancers to bring back the spirit of dancing, street dance wouldn’t be what it is today, so we are still very lucky,” said Lay.

As early as age 24, Lay has clearly illustrated what “hard work” meant to his life in his biography.

In the book, he recalled a past event: “Once, I video-called my mother in the underground training room. I wrung out my clothes and there was sweat dripping on all over the floor. Then I said, ‘Mom, I really tried my best. If I didn’t make my debut, please don’t blame me!’ Later I realized why I said it at that time. It was a deeply concealed feeling that I have fooled even myself. For me, all efforts should have a result. The meaning of working hard is to hope for a better self, and I will also get scared if my efforts doesn’t promise a future.”

At the age of 24, Lay wrote: “Hard work won’t guarantee you reach your goal, but it will absolutely make a difference. The final outcome, no matter what it is, will definitely be different from never trying at all. No one can determine the future, but the muscle memories collected in your body will determine how and where you stand when the moment comes.”

Just wait and see

Born in 1991, he is stepping in his 30s next year. “SDC3” is TV shows that needs a lot of physical strength and Lay can feel the changes brought onto his body as he ages.

When asked about the cypher battle that was thoroughly fought and won, Lay said that he hasn’t reach his body limit, which would be around 7 to 8 rounds. But, if he were to have the stamina of his 17 or 18’s, he could’ve done a lot better.

Even Jackson who is 3 years younger than Lay sighed about the fleeting youth. Lay told him something that he could not forget until now, “Bro, we’re not young anymore.”

A problem that all dancers have to face is as they grow older, their physical functions decline. Wallace Chung also asked Meng Lin, a contestant in the show, what can they do to improve themselves as they grow older.

Lay doesn’t have an answer to that, “I can’t prevent myself from getting old. First of all, you have to admit that if your body can’t keep up, you should not force it to.”

Five years ago, the 24-year-old Lay named his biography “Standing Firm”. He was already “standing firm” 6 years ahead of the age of 30 (In Chinese culture, people in their 30s are expected to be well established, or firmly stood). He said his reflection then was to encourage himself to fly proudly toward the actual “standing firm” age of 30.

Lay had just accepted the offer for “Go Fighting!” at that time. He knew that he had a big fanbase among a certain community, but when he really stepped out on the streets during filming, he realized there were not that many people who knew about him. He used 5 years to “fly forward” and is slowly gaining success in films, TV shows, reality shows as well as music and other fields.

Lay’s fans often described him as “the number one dancing singer”. Lay first stressed that he never said he wanted to have such title, but when this buzzword started to be linked closely to him on social media, he bore on his shoulder the expectation from fans and judgement from others. “I think what I should do is to make the best of it, I can’t interfere with how people think. They can keep their ways of thinking, and I can keep doing what I should do.”

There’s a line in his new song “LIT’s” that says “The path I still walk, never turning back. Step forward to the next level.” Lay’s definition for “the next level” is “just wait and see, I hope that it’s gonna be a great piece of work.”

As of today, Lay has released 4 albums which when put together form the character “爺” in a circular structure. The albums follow a concept of “The two modes generate four symbols, the four symbols generate eight trigrams” (A concept of Taiji, originated from “I Chang”). Lay also hinted that the four symbols — Black Tortoise, Azure Dragon, Vermilion Bird and White Tiger — are all related to what he wants to do in the future. Seems like he also has a wild ambition to accompany his hard-working.

Talking about plans for his life at 30s, he said that he wanted to find himself something different to do, “I might just become a PD and train other trainees myself, who knows.”

Aside from having “hard-work” as one of his annotations in life, Lay has also mentioned several times about his personality of “lacking confidence” and “feeling inferior”.

When he was younger, he was often compared with other kids. He mentioned in his biography that he felt a sense of inferiority because he couldn’t find his unique presence and value in the group. He also mentioned in his documentary “REKNOW” that he felt that same sense of inferiority and kept asking himself “Why couldn’t I play drums or skateboard, why couldn’t I do this or that. I feel like Lay Zhang should know something about everything.”

When Lay has won over the hearts of audience through “SDC3”, and started to be recognized by the public, here’s a saved question for the future Lay: “Do you still feel unconfident? Will you reconcile with the sense of inferiority at your 30s?”

Source: 娱理 WeChat 200810 interview

Translated by XingTweetTRANS