(Im)penetrable: A Dancer's Asian-ness Negotiated Through Collaboration

Date of Submission

Fall 2018

Academic Programs and Concentrations

Dance

Project Advisor 1

Lindsay Clark

Project Advisor 2

Leah Cox

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Artist Statement:

In my work as a dance artist, I am interested in the physicality of work and what the visibility of this does for both the performers and the audience. It is based on a personal need to challenge oneself physically to negotiate a way to find comfortability within the laborious movement, continuing to push that comfortability further away. It is also based on the way that the movement makes me as an audience member feel. I am constantly in awe of the experimentation, finding new ways to make a body work and witnessing the work involved. I like watching pieces and recognizing that there was a process in the work. And I think that work that is blatant in the laboriousness, also shows the process of making it.

I am interested in the relationships from performer to performer, and a performer’s relationship to those in power. How does power affect those relationships? I am interested in collaboration and how does this structure alter, create a space for these relationships, or is a mechanism to subvert power. Within collaboration, there is a necessity for agency and I am working on how does agency and power go hand in hand with collaboration. I am defining collaboration specifically as the relationship where all parties are prepared to contribute equally. And how these function within a structure of hierarchy and within a subverted one. I am experimenting with the relationships within the structure and the impact of pre-existing terms of partnership.

My identity as an Asian American woman is a critical piece of this investigation, because of how the behavioral characteristics of the model minority are projected on me by society and have become ingrained into my decisions. All of this is with the lens of understanding my relationship to hierarchy as an Asian American woman within a value system of both maker and dancer.

Open Access Agreement

Open Access

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
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