How can the practice of performance forge new forms of resistance to tyranny and imagine a more liberatory collective future for Asian America? This panel uses practice-as-research (PaR) to consider how performance can serve as a model for ethical relationality, cross racial solidarity, and decoloniality. It can offer a vital mode of resistance against the enduring legacies of U.S. imperialism and Asian settler colonialism. Our three papers collectively demonstrate how the moving Asian/Asian American body can be reclaimed as a site of sovereignty and a tool for building resistance.

The first paper analyzes curation as an artistic practice that charts how resistive, anticolonial solidarities—between performers across Asia and the diaspora—are actively formed and nurtured against escalating state and national tyrannies. The second paper reclaims the stereotype of Asian American passivity, reframing it as a choreographic politics of self-possession and relational vulnerability, proposing it as an embodied act of attentiveness in the face of political violence and xenophobia. Finally, the third project grounds its PaR in Honolulu, developing a trans-Pacific framework that critiques how Western archives and Chinese bodily regulation enact aesthetic violence through exclusion. It argues for embodied improvisation as a living, self-inscriptive archive that reclaims the dancer's agency.

Together, these papers use performance to challenge imperial regulation, forge transnational connection, and offer concrete methodologies toward transformative justice and Indigenous-aligned sovereignty in the Asia-Pacific.