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Introduction
- Wesleyan University Press
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- 1 Introduction Can you name an Asian American choreographer? I asked this question years ago when I choreographed my first dance. No one could give me an answer. There I was in the studio, sweating and taking inventory of each newly discovered ache in my back, trying to make sense of my double life performing as Miss Moon Festival contestant number ten and as an aspiring, angst-ridden Asian American choreographer. Both performances claimed to represent the voice of an Asian American community, yet each followed different aesthetic and political agendas. Two performances by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Dance Theatre of Harlem inspired my first forays in choreography. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s production of Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s Shelter and Dance Theatre of Harlem’s Firebird staged black bodies that had nothing to do with the racial stereotypes perpetuated by mainstream media. This was self-representational work that married to-die-for six o’clock extensions with social commentary—I thought I was in heaven. More importantly, the sheer number of black bodies on stage heightened the whiteness of the dance studios I had spent my life in. If dancing assumes looking at the body, these choreographers shifted my looking. These works prompted me to question how I looked at dancing bodies, how race functions in the dance studio, and, finally, why I could not name a single Asian American choreographer. Choreographing Asian America examines the relationship between Asian America and American dance history and the attendant disciplinary, political , methodological, and aesthetic concerns. With a focus on Club O’ Noodles (con), the first Vietnamese American performance ensemble established in the United States, this study makes the work of a Vietnamese American performance collective central to an investigation of Asian American dance. Founded in 1993 by Hung Nguyen and Tram Le, this Los Angeles–based company was the first Vietnamese American performance ensemble dedi- 2 - Choreographing Asian America cated to articulating a bicultural perspective of living as Vietnamese refugees and immigrants in the United States. Guided by Nobuko Miyamoto, a pioneer of the Asian American theater scene in the 1960s, Club O’ Noodles’s performance aesthetic in the mid- to late 1990s drew upon modern and postmodern dance techniques, song, poetry , and spoken dialogue to craft performances that called attention to the Vietnamese American experience in the United States. The company sought to integrate Vietnamese American identity into the narrative of American national identity that found the term ‘‘Vietnamese American’’ irreconcilable within American narratives of the Vietnam War, and to create an alternative site for Vietnamese American artists to stage multidisciplinary dancetheater productions.∞ I use the term ‘‘dancetheater,’’ derived from the German tanztheater , to account for the multidisciplinary and theatrical elements of Club O’ Noodles’s work. Dancetheater, broadly defined, combines choreographed movement, spoken text, singing, and other media (projections and installations ) with theatrical elements to present nonlinear or abstract performance works that evoke images, feelings, or references to specific moments or historical events in a manner that does not necessarily tell a cohesive story. Choreographing Asian America is an ethnography that began in a library, rather than a studio, where in 1994 my initial catalog searches for ‘‘Asian American dance’’ and ‘‘Asian American choreographers’’ never failed to produce ‘‘zero results.’’ ‘‘Asian American performance’’ did not fare any better.Asearchfor‘‘AsianAmericantheater’’finallyyieldedfourpublications that each offer collections of plays by Asian American writers. Three of them are anthologies: Between Worlds: Contemporary Asian-American Plays (1990), edited by Misha Berson; The Politics of Life: Four Plays by Asian American Women (1993), edited by Velina Hasu Houston; and Unbroken Thread: An Anthology of Plays by Asian American Women (1993), edited by Roberta Uno. In addition to these collections, James Moy’s Marginal Sights: Staging the Chinese in America (1993) traces the historical construction of Orientalized Chineseness in the United States across a variety of representational practices, including late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century theater, circus acts, photography , and Hollywood film. It also includes an analysis comparing David Henry Hwang’s Broadway production of M. Butterfly (1988) to Philip Kan Gotanda’s off-Broadway production Yankee Dawg You Die (1988). By the time I embarked on my fieldwork (attending rehearsals and [35.169.107.177] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:43 GMT) Introduction - 3 performances with Club O’ Noodles) in 1997, the first two book-length critical studies of Asian American theater had been published. Josephine Lee’s Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the...