Beyond the Stage: The New Zealander at the Heart of Asia’s Biggest Tours

The noise hits you before anything else. Eighty thousand people filling a stadium in mainland China, the air thick with anticipation, screens the size of buildings framing a stage that has taken weeks to construct. For most of the crowd, this is the night they’ve waited months for. For Caleb Jerome, it is show night — one of dozens he has now stood through on Jolin Tsai’s Pleasure Stadium Tour.

Jerome (in photo) is a dancer and choreographer born in Auckland and raised in Christchurch. He is also one of the New Zealanders working closest to the centre of Asia’s entertainment industry, performing inside productions built on a scale this country simply doesn’t have. Getting there involved years of training most people never see, and a willingness to immerse himself fully in an industry, and a culture, that he had no real connection to growing up.

Growing up between Auckland and Christchurch, Jerome trained the way most serious young New Zealand dancers do — long hours, competitive dance competitions, a tight-knit community built on mutual ambition. He competed at the HHI World Hip Hop Dance Championships in Phoenix, Arizona in 2019 — widely regarded as the world championship of hip hop dance, drawing teams from dozens of countries — co-leading choreography for a New Zealand crew that placed tenth globally. Alongside performing, he was teaching dance and choreographing at studios across the South Island, and signed with Auckland agency 3WJ+Boy as he started working more regularly in the industry. By the time the opportunity in Asia came along, he’d already put in years building toward it.

That opportunity came through Kiel Tutin, a New Zealand choreographer Jerome had worked with in Auckland. Tutin had choreographed for Jolin Tsai’s Ugly Beauty Tour through The Squared Division, an Australian creative production and creative direction company that works with some of the biggest artists and live productions in the world, including J Balvin and Katy Perry, and recommended Jerome for the show — his introduction to a scale of live performance New Zealand simply doesn’t offer.

Jolin Tsai with Caleb. Image supplied.

For anyone who needs the comparison: Jolin Tsai is often described as the Madonna of Asia. She’s a Taiwanese pop icon with a career spanning almost three decades, a fanbase in the hundreds of millions, and stadium productions that rival anything you’d see from the biggest names in Western pop. These shows aren’t just concerts — the staging and visuals are built so that for a few hours, eighty thousand people feel like they’ve stepped inside Jolin’s world, and Jerome is one of the people on stage helping bring that world to life.

Jerome went on to do the Ugly Beauty Tour’s 2024 dates as well, and is currently performing on the Pleasure Stadium Tour across mainland China and Taiwan. He’s not the new guy anymore. Getting asked back, tour after tour, is its own kind of proof that he’s delivering what the production needs.

So what does this kind of work actually demand? It’s the same high standard the whole industry holds itself to — every part of the show has to be as good as it can be, every night, whether it’s the first show of the tour or the fortieth. There’s no version of this job where you can give less than your best and get away with it.

A BTS photo- Image supplied.

There was one night Jolin decided, with only a few hours’ notice before the show, that she wanted to add a brand-new number to the set. Jerome had to learn the choreography in that window and perform it in front of a packed stadium that same evening, with no real margin to second-guess himself. That kind of thing happens more than people might expect. There isn’t time to be precious about it — you learn it, you trust your preparation, and you walk out and do it.

There’s also a cultural side to it that goes beyond work ethic. You’re performing in a language that isn’t your first, inside a culture with its own codes and its own way of reading professionalism, and you have to figure that out fast. You learn to watch and listen before you open your mouth. Trust gets built slowly, through showing up and doing the job well, not through being the loudest person in the room.

What Jerome reckons he brought from home was adaptability — a fairly Kiwi way of just getting on with things, plus a creative openness that comes from being an outsider looking in. That outsider perspective turned out to actually be useful, and it’s a decent example of what New Zealand performers can bring to this part of the world when they’re willing to put in the time.

Jerome is not finished with Asia. But the next chapter is already taking shape. He is currently working through the process of applying for an O-1 Extraordinary Ability Visa — the US government’s recognition of a career that meets an exceptional standard. He has already been offered a coaching position in the United States, one that will become real once the visa comes through, and the plan is to relocate to Los Angeles and bring everything the past several years have built into the American industry.

Auckland and Christchurch to Asia to Los Angeles. It’s the kind of trajectory that doesn’t happen by accident, and it’s given Jerome a genuine foothold inside one of the biggest entertainment industries in the world. What he’s built over these past few years isn’t just a list of credits. It’s the experience and the standard to match anyone working at this level, and he’s carrying that with him into whatever comes next.

-Asia Media Centre