Q: What have been some challenges in your pre-professional or professional dance career?

One of the main challenges in attending a BFA dance program is that there was a specific idea of what they were preparing us for. There was this divide between what you want to do and what you are being prepared for. That’s why I’m so heavily invested in critical dance studies. I wasn’t sure why we were being made into these modern dancers that came from competition studios. We never talked about what dance is, about what our responsibility was as dancers. We never talked about why we’re doing this.

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Q: Do you believe dance can be a platform for social justice topics?

Yes. Part of what I teach is dance history. And what I’m doing is educating undergraduates about how dance is the expression of humanity. Part of humanity is social justice. We see it in so many ways. Even party dances. The underpinnings of hip hop is social justice. It emerged from people who were disenfranchised. City services disappeared and only recently reappeared as gentrification moved. And these folks said, “You can’t stop us from expressing who we are and that we exist.” If you look at hip-hop in Zulu culture, it’s peace, love, unity and having fun. Those ideas become means of survival for people who are not given the civil liberties expected of all Americans. Many of us understand the foundation of this country is built on the backs of black and brown people.

Q: What has been your professional dance journey?

I grew up in central New Jersey in a predominantly white, middle-class suburb where I did a lot of competitions. I got two degrees in dance and journalism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. After college I moved to New York City and worked for Elizabeth Zimmer, the dance editor at The Village Voice. I also freelanced for Dance Spirit magazine. Dance Spirit asked me to write an article about B-Girls and they sent me out on assignments to meet B-Girls. I met Rockafella, Tweetie, and Mega on a photoshoot. I took a master class with Miss Twist and met Robin Dunn. I was eventually introduced to the person who would become my breaking mentor, Breakeasy. I started breaking in Brooklyn while my day job was working at Dance Space Center, first as work/study then into marketing. I resigned from Dance Space Center because I started graduate school at Columbia University in the Center for American Studies program. Dance Space Center closed and reopened as Gibney Dance. During my five years working at Dance Space Center I was breaking pretty harcore. I danced for Mia Love and performed with Kate Rig at Joe’s Pub. I also auditioned for commercial gigs as a hip-hop dancer. I also did some concert dance work. I was breaking at night, going to jams and competing as well. Once I realized I wasn’t getting enough sleep I went to grad school to write about breaking because I didn’t see any of my experience reflected in the scholarship at that time. At Columbia I was able to study whatever I wanted. I got to study with Aaron Fox for ethnic musicology, Marianne Hirsch in comparative literature and Mary Marshall Clark, currently the director of what is now the Columbia Center for Oral History Research. I wrote my MA thesis as an oral history of the B-Girls of NYC in the 1990s. At first I wanted to connect the Bronx to Brooklyn dance history. I then realized I didn’t want to do that. Instead, I wanted to talk about women in the breaking scene that hadn’t been discussed at all. I did five oral history interviews with women in my crew. I realized how integral their contributions were. I was toeing the line between performance and academia. And then I got injured. I had a herniated disk in my lower back. I thought my dancing career was over. It took me three years to recover and finish my master’s program. Marlies Yearby emailed me and asked if I sang. She told me the final tour of “Rent” needed a dance captain. I said sure. I auditioned for that and booked. I thought my performance career was over but I ended up having my most recognized gig. It was the final Broadway tour, an all star cast. I didn’t know how I belonged there. I consider myself a decent singer. I toured “Rent” for a few months and that changed my life. When I came back to NYC off the tour I was determined to shift from dancing into acting. I trained intensely in Meisner technique with Matthew Corozine.  Before I would really start acting I was pregnant and got married, another big shift in my life. We moved out to California in 2015. Since then I’ve been teaching at the California State University Channel Islands. I started the PhD program in art last fall at the University of California, Los Angeles designed specifically for a degree in culture and performance. The program is interdisciplinary between anthropology and performance studies. There’s a dance component but not everyone pursuing their PhD focuses on dance. Some of the people from “Rent” went back on the road for the 20th anniversary and I’ve been the associate choreographer for that. Everything in my life has something to do with dance in one form or another. I have an agent who occasionally sends me out but with this situation that’s off the table.

Q: What have been some challenges in your pre-professional or professional dance career?

One of the main challenges in attending a BFA dance program is that there was a specific idea of what they were preparing us for. There was this divide between what you want to do and what you are being prepared for. That’s why I’m so heavily invested in critical dance studies. I wasn’t sure why we were being made into these modern dancers that came from competition studios. We never talked about what dance is, about what our responsibility was as dancers. We never talked about why we’re doing this. I didn’t know the difference between modernism and modern. If you’re training people to be modern dancers, you need to teach them what the difference is. By the time I left college, I didn’t know how to build a resume or find an agent. I had a head shot that was bad. I had a vague idea that I needed to get Backstage magazine and look at auditions. But we weren’t given the tools to pursue life as a dancer. My senior year they had a panel where they brought back alumni. I remember a UMASS alumni said to find a job where you can make your rent. I remember one said that they worked at Starbucks because they need health insurance. I was like, “What?” 

I built a very strong network at UMASS while I was there. Education taught me that people are really important. Your personal ingenuity is important. You can’t rely on a system or structure to give you the things you need. I could say it was unfortunate that I didn’t go to a dance college that had all these resources but at the same time I was so involved with people that just wanted to make stuff. You can’t market that or build that into a program. That was the main challenge but also a benefit. Being in NYC I feel really fortunate to have found my way to Elizabeth Zimmer because she introduced me to the entire NYC dance scene. One of my challenges to this day is trying to write about something that doesn’t benefit from being in your head. One thing that always held me back was thinking too much. It was weird being the only Asian person in both departments at UMASS and sort of struggling quietly with a lot of issues about identity. I didn’t take an Asian-American studies class until this past fall. I wish I’d done that sooner. I think I would have understood that what I was grappling with was not unique. There have been people that have talked and written about this for a very long time. That would have affected the work I would have gone and made. The people I’ve worked with have helped me parce my views and understanding. Finding hip-hop and the underground hip-hop culture in NYC was the first time I felt comfortable in my skin. It allowed me to be the person I should be. Challenges taught me a lot about who I am. It can be a painful process though.

Q: Do you believe dance can be a platform for social justice topics? If so, how? and/or Have you used your art form to make a difference?

Yes. Part of what I teach is dance history. And what I’m doing is educating undergraduates about how dance is the expression of humanity. Part of humanity is social justice. We see it in so many ways. Even party dances. The underpinnings of hip hop is social justice. It emerged from people who were disenfranchised. City services disappeared and only recently reappeared as gentrification moved. And these folks said, “You can’t stop us from expressing who we are and that we exist.” If you look at hip-hop in Zulu culture, it’s peace, love, unity and having fun. Those ideas become means of survival for people who are not given the civil liberties expected of all Americans. Many of us understand the foundation of this country is built on the backs of black and brown people. Dances like the cakewalk and minstrelsy—things so in service of making fun of your masters—becoming dance crazes, there’s something really subversive about it. Satire helps to mitigate power differentials. It is a function of capitalism. Dancing with your friends and having a good time is a radical resistive action. It happens on this scale from “Las Teses” to these everyday activities like Tiktok. Dance in almost every single situation can be an expression of resistance and empowerment. 

Q: How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected you as a performing artist and educator?

My parents live in South Korea. I’ve been speaking with my mom regularly. After a couple of weeks she said they were fine. At the end of January she was really worried about the US. She told us to stay home. A friend of mine also said she’d heard that we were going to be moving online. All of those things made me realize there was a huge shift about to happen. I already teach dance history online. I have been teaching online for two years. I wasn’t worried about that. I was ready with Canvas. I was concerned that I was hearing nothing at UCLA or my son’s school. I fed the information to my [department] chair. I asked if we were planning anything. At that point we didn’t know how serious it was going to be. No one was talking about it but on my own I started to go shopping. I started to prepare my colleagues at Channel Island. I was talking about how we could put physical dance classes online. We had been talking about what the challenges would be in the beginning of February. My chair at UCLA asked me at the beginning of March to evaluate some online websites. It became a Google Doc that’s been viewed by I don’t know how many people. There have been about 85 people looking at the document at a time. I posted it the first Saturday in March. We decided we would have a Zoom meeting for moving online. That Sunday it was just me and one other colleague. Tuesday things started closing. Wednesday schools closed. Thursday we scheduled a Zoom session but because everything was closing it turned into a webinar presented by the dance studies association and 153 tuned in. It’s been viewed 1,000 times since. The first one was the nuts and bolts of how we put university dance courses online. We followed up last Thursday with part two about the social and emotional issues of teaching dance courses online. 

My son’s schools have finally closed. The reality of having two kids at home, cooking three meals at home, having them do school work, managing my 12-unit course load and continuing to teach my two classes has begun to sink in. I was preparing but it’s still very overwhelming. I was thinking about if I had enough food and medicine. I hadn’t thought about the emotional aspect of it. Despite all my preparation, I’ve suffered the most emotionally. I’ve taken four days off and just shut down instead of pushing forward. We now know that school will be shut through June. I don’t think it will be shut down for the fall. But I’m anticipating it might be if there’s another outbreak. I’ve also been navigating the emotional fallout. How do we manage the emotional aspect to all of this? There are a lot of people in despair that don’t know how to handle it. It’s hard because I do as a profession all the things that others do to chill out. 

Q: Using the idea of “worldmaking” how do you imagine the performing arts world after the pandemic? (Worldmaking: How you can re-imagine the world in your own terms, the way you want it to be. Using this tool one can construct new worlds and write themselves into narratives that have excluded them and systems that have disabled them.)

Related to the idea of world-making is this notion called “habitus,” how the structure affects who you are and what your actions are, and how that goes back into what the structure is. One of the most important changes from this pandemic is that things we said were so important—equal access to the Internet, paying for health care—the importance of all of these things that the political left has been pushing are becoming clear. Also most people are stuck at home consuming things made by artists. Arts have never been supported by the U. S. government. They’ve never been something of importance. I’m hoping people will have clarity about the things that are important. We should support a minimum wage that allows people to live. Artists should be supported to do the things that we do. 

Nothing will replace live performance. It’s so unique. But I think we will see a lot of families making art and putting it online. We will see more people engaging in art-making on a regular basis. That will become a priority. That these practices are necessary to our humanity. And so I hope that the post-pandemic world will include more dance, more music, more plays and more moments of human expression. [Those in] power want us to be cogs in a machine but there will be more space for excess and joy. 

I hope there will be more colorfulness in the world, that we will be more mindful of our planetary surroundings and the other living things that we coexist with. The other important thing is the awareness of how much the planet needs us to be inside of our houses. I hope this is a collective moment of meditation. I don’t want to make light of the people physically struggling for their lives because it comes at such a cost. That is what is being sacrificed in this moment. 

I hope we learn how to breathe together and with the Earth, that we come out of this more conscious and mindful of what actions are and can be.

When I applied for the adjunct position in California, one thing in my cover letters was that dance as we know it will be completely different in the coming decades. We have no idea what that will look like. We know the small company dance model doesn’t work. Only huge companies with huge funders can survive. I hope my generation of dance educators can pass on the things we learned onto the next generation so that they can lead and teach the world to be a human in mind and body. I go to work with my brain and I go to the gym with my body. But when we say we’re full human beings we mean that we have bodies and we have minds. Dance scholars have been thinking about inequities and ecological impacts along with how human beings move for years. I’m really hopeful dancers will lead that charge. 

My husband is a visual artist. We talk often about what follows capitalism. To be specific, capitalism is an economic paradigm where we equate money with value. That’s often not the truth. Things that are valuable often don’t equal the money they are awarded. What would it take to figure out what is post-capitalism? Would it take a revolution? None of us brought up a virus as the cause of the paradigm shift. But our economy is crumbling. This economic system is not sustainable. Capitalism is not sustainable. The question you ask is how can dancers and artists make themselves sustainable? You learn how capitalism works and figure out where you belong. How do I make rent so I can pay for my life? You have to understand the numbers. How do I get a day job that pays the bills that also allows me the freedom to dance with other companies? That’s understanding the economic system in order to survive. The other way to think about it is what would the world look like after capitalism? In a changed world, what do my services offer? If the world doesn’t have money, we have to figure out how to coexist. How would what I do be valuable to the rest of society?  How do we look at things as a circle? You exchange energy in circles. But how does the structure of the circle reflect the rest of society? What is valuable in that moment? 

A lot of it is understanding the moment we’re in, how we got here and what we would imagine the world we want to live in to be. How do we make that happen? Does that mean becoming an activist so everyone has a universal basic income? If these things are important to us then it is on each individual to become an activist in order to enact that change. Sitting around saying it should happen—ask yourself what actions you can take to make it happen. For me it’s understanding the hows and whys. The basic idea is asking how we can achieve our vision of what we want. The more we get organized the more we can move towards a common vision. The more we get organized … the faster it can happen.