Choreographing Asian America (review)

"Can you name an Asian American choreographer?" (1)—so begins Yutian Wong's groundbreaking study, Choreographing Asian America. This book carefully and critically fills the silence that would presumably follow this question. I suggest silence because the two sites the question seeks—Asian America and dance—are both marginalized territories within the U.S. cultural landscape. To interpolate a subject who is both Asian American and a choreographer is to bring into being a heretofore invisible presence that nonetheless has much to tell us about the politics and aesthetics of identity in the United States.

To begin, the idea of an Asian American carries within it a history of Orientalism that would see such an identity as only ever a paradoxical impossibility. Over a hundred years of imperialism, war, anti-immigrant law, and global economic exploitation have produced and are produced by a logic of the East as absolute other to the West (Said 1979). As a result there is never such a thing as a truly "American" Asian. Asians are perceived as perpetual foreigners in the United States, regardless of how many generations we have been here (Takaki 1990). To call forth an Asian American choreographer, therefore, reveals the ways in which Asians in the United States have been made illegible.

Dance, as DRJ readers are already aware, is a marginalized field of study within the academy and a marginalized practice within the field of the arts more generally. Despite the then doubly obscured notion of an Asian American choreographer, however, there is in fact a strong historical link between Asian America and Western modern dance. As Wong cites in her book, dance scholars such as Sally Banes (1998), Jane Desmond (1991), Amy Koritz (1994), and Suzanne Shelton (1981) have revealed the deep legacy of Orientalism and Asian influence in the history of modern and postmodern dance—from Ruth St. Denis' and Maud Allan's appropriations of imagined Oriental dances to Martha Graham's Asianist designs; from Steve Paxton's interest in aikido and Deborah Hay's Buddhism-inspired Circle Dances to Merce Cunningham's use of the I-Ching and the latest interest in yoga and tai chi as mental and physical conditioning for dancers. Priya Srinivasan has taken this historical work a step further by thinking not just about the white choreographers who were inspired through their Orientalist imaginings of the East, but about the actual Asian bodies who may have inspired them. In one article, Srinivasan brings to life a group of women dancers from India who were brought to the U.S. to perform in the 1880s, thereby excavating their contributions from out of obscurity (2009). In another essay, she considers the experiences of two Indian women who danced at Coney Island in 1904 and may have been the motivation for Ruth St. Denis' exotic dances, as well as the three Indian men who provided a corporeal backdrop in some of these pieces. Srinivasan literally gives voice to these previously ignored individuals by creating a dialogue among them in her essay (2007). In this way, she brings actual Asian America into contact with the mythologized history of early modern dance, which has done little to acknowledge the presence and contribution of Asians to this history.

Choreographing Asian America moves from Srinivasan's insertion of Asian bodies into a history of U.S. American dance to consider the effect of this legacy on contemporary Asian American dance makers. Wong writes:

The invisibility of Orientalism in American modern and postmodern dance history poses a problem for Asian American choreographers. Asian Americans are not viewed as abstract bodies engaging in artistic experiments. Instead, they are seen through an Orientalist double vision in which their bodily Asianness must remain distanced from the modern and postmodern dance vocabularies they are using. . . . While white Western choreographers can mask appropriation through accounts of inspiration, Asian American performance aesthetics are stereotyped as attempts to fuse or blend incompatible Eastern and Western sensibilities. The fact that American modern and postmodern dance are already...