SanSan Kwan
UC Berkeley
Actions
Professor and Chair, Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, UC Berkeley. Research interests: dance studies, performance studies, Asian American studies. Books: Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration (Oxford, 2021) (de la Torre Bueno© Award, Isadora Duncan Dance Award); Kinesthetic City: Dance and Movement in Chinese Urban Spaces (Oxford, 2013) Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects (co-edited with Kenneth Speirs) (University of Texas Press, 2004). Journal articles: Dance Research Journal, TDR, Theatre Survey, Choreographic Practices, Performance Research, ASAP Journal, plus chapters in several book anthologies. Recent performance work: Lenora Lee Dance, Chingchi Moves, Jen Liu.
Performance-as-Research as Relations of Resistance
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.
How to Make a Passive Dance (Part Two)
In my recent scholarship I explore questions around the politics and aesthetics of Asian American passivity. I am now turning to this question in my creative work. This paper reflects upon a choreographic process I am currently undertaking. I am making a dance that responds to our present era of heightened anti-Asian violence via a paradoxical exploration of passivity. Of course, passivity is a well-worn Asian stereotype. My piece plays at multiple valences around this historically pejorative idea.
An Asian American femme dancer lies centerstage moving slowly, eyes shut. Other Asian American dancers stand above her, watching. Are these dancers surveilling? Are they protecting? Will they hurt or cradle the woman on the floor? I aim to engender an ambiguous visceral response from the audience. On one hand, I want to offer a glimpse of the profound fear of violence that Asian Americans experience. On the other, I hope to offer a performance of care and possibly of restoration. To move with eyes closed and to invite someone to witness you at close range is an act of profound vulnerability. The dancer submits herself to another person. This submission, I argue, is not a giving over of agency, but a willingness to be in relation. Through a choreographic study of submission, I problematize characterizations of Asian American passivity, not to assert the value of invulnerability, but to demonstrate an experience of self-possession through relational vulnerability.
This paper documents the challenges and the choreographic solutions I encounter through the dancemaking process.
SanSan Kwan
UC Berkeley
Actions
Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.
Jump to top