Creative Team
Music/Co-lyrics: Bethy Bacon
Story: Laura Goodenow
Choreography: Kerry Lee
Bethy Bacon
Composer/Co-lyricist
Bethy Bacon is a Puerto Rican-born performance artist, composer, and piano-poet. She began recording her music in 1983, and since has created 12 albums of original work, as well as more than 80 songs inspired by ancient Chinese poetry.
After receiving her certification in Fine Art in 1976 from The School of the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, with a keen interest in Asian Arts, she attended the School of Visual Arts in NYC. In 1981, she received her BFA in Sculpture and Performance Art.
Her interest in Asian culture grew when, suffering from a 10-year illness, Beth used diligent tai chi practice and vitamin therapy to recover. She began her professional teaching career of Yang Family Traditional-Style Tai Chi while continuing to study with the Yang Family 4th and 6th generation Masters in the US.
Then, while living and studying Mandarin in China in 2006, Beth began a musical dialogue between cultures, promoting peace through the use of poetry, philosophy and song. From that experience her Chinese Poetry Project, GOLD JADE WAY, was born. For Bethy’s full CV, click HERE.
Photo: Beth on a boat on West Lake, Hangzhou, China.
Laura Goodenow
Librettist/Producer
Laura Goodenow is a librettist, lyricist, editor, writer, producer, and distributor who heard Bethy’s quirky sound and immediately fell in love with the concept.
In addition to GOLD JADE WAY, her other musicals in development include EXPOSED (book, lyrics), CROST (book, lyrics), and cleaVage (co-book). She works as a script editor and development consultant for other theater and film creators, as well as an editor and ghostwriter for memoirists.
Laura developed and produced the award-winning feature film YEAR BY THE SEA, based on the NYT and international best-selling memoir by Joan Anderson, starring Karen Allen, Yannick Bisson, S. Epatha Merkerson, Michael Cristofer, and Celia Imrie. Her company Real Women Make Waves distributed the movie to more than 100 theaters nationwide. YEAR BY THE SEA currently is available for rent and purchase on Amazon.
Before her career focused on books, theatre and film, Laura was as an award-winning print journalist, photographer, and newspaper editor, as well as a corporate editor and pharmaceutical advisory board notetaker.
Kerry Lee
Choreographer
Kerry Lee is the Co-Artistic Director of Atlanta Chinese Dance Company, where she began her dance journey while training in Atlanta Ballet’s pre-professional division. After graduating from Stanford University with an engineering degree, she followed her heart into the professional dance world in New York City and toured nationally and internationally with Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company, H.T. Chen & Dancers, Dance China NY, and gloATL before returning home to co-lead Atlanta Chinese Dance Company with her mother Hwee-Eng Lee. Since 1991 the multigenerational troupe has shared Chinese and Chinese American history and culture through full-evening Chinese dance productions as well as numerous community performances, lecture-demonstrations, and workshops/residencies throughout the South.
For many years Kerry worked at the intersection of the arts and activism on staff at Alternate ROOTS, which inspired her to create Chinese dance choreography sharing rarely told Chinese American stories. Her work has been performed at the national Dance/USA conference and discussed in China’s prestigious Beijing Dance Academy Forum as an example of groundbreaking choreography reflecting Asian American experiences through dance. In 2024, she created choreography for Synchronicity Theatre’s WHERE THE MOUNTAIN MEETS THE MOON based on an award-winning children’s novel inspired by Chinese folklore. Kerry is honored to work with Bethy and Laura on GOLD JADE WAY! To learn more about Kerry Lee, click HERE.
Translators/Co-lyricists
Thank you to the following translators for their beautiful poems - and to their publishing companies and/or heirs for allowing us to use them as lyrics.
Thank you, as well, to the original poets whose words first gave life to this project.
Sam Hamill
Translating Li T'ai-po, Liu Yung, Li Ch'ing-chao, and Wang Wei.
With permission of Tiger Bark Press and White Pine Press.
Burton Watson
Translating Su Tung-P’o.
With permission of the Burton Watson estate.
Jonathan Chaves
Translating Yüan Hung-tao.
With permission of White Pine Press.
Jim Scott
Translating Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche.
With permission of Jim Scott.
Kenneth Rexroth
Translating Ch'ien Ch'i.
With permission of New Directions Publishing.
Thomas Cleary
Translating Tang Guangzhen.
With permission of North Atlantic Books.