Kwan, S. & Wong, Y., (2023) “Dancing in the Aftermath of Anti-Asian Violence: An Introduction in Three Parts”, Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies 42. doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/conversations.3645
Bennyroyce and Marie discuss trauma and its impact on Begin Again’s movement material
Dance Conservatory Seattle, August 2022
This month, Dance Studies Association: Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies journal published Volume 42 Dancing in the Aftermath of Anti-Asian Violence: An Introduction in Three Parts. This entire journal, including writings by artists like Gerald Casel, SanSan Kwan, Yutian Wong, Joyce Lu, Johnny Huy Nguyen, Crystal Song, and other several others, centers on trauma experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic that informs and inspires Begin Again. I will touch several of these articles in separate posts.
Today, I would like to refer to SanSan Kwan and Yutian Wong’s “Dancing in the Aftermath of Anti-Asian Violence: An Introduction in Three Parts.” They write:
The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred a correspondingly virulent spate of anti-Asian sentiment in the West, particularly in the United States. Fueled by xenophobia and racism, attacks on Asians in North America, the UK, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand have increased at alarming rates, but the convergence of anti-Chinese rhetoric, anti-science conspiracy theories, police violence, the lack of nationalized healthcare, and the lack of will to pass or enforce gun control laws in the United States has translated into a moment in which Asian life, like that of other Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) life in the United States, is once again deemed disposable. The contours of this hatred—and the violence through which it is expressed—are far from new.
Inside the research and development phase of Begin Again in August of 2022, Bennyroyce often referred to pandemic-induced trauma. (He continues to do so in 2023.) Not just grief, or bereavement, but emotional and spiritual wounds. His research around the qualitative aspects of the movement material he was inventing circled back again and again to this concept. It was especially important to be working toward discovering methods for healing, but always within a historically informed context. So, it is relevent that Kwan and Wong contextualize their introduction thusly:
Anti-Asian violence in the United States has existed for hundreds of years; and it is the result of a long history of racist immigration laws, the legacy of empire building, and militarism. The year 2022 marks the 140th anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was the first race-based immigration law in the United States. It provided the blueprint for subsequent anti-immigration policies, as well as current-day anti-Asian rhetoric. The COVID-19 pandemic has merely re- invoked nineteenth- and twentieth-century formations of Asian bodies as vectors of disease, contamination, and infiltration.
Much of the thought behind Begin Again is motivated by Bennyroyce’s determination to face the particular trauma encountered in the pandemic context by people in the AAPI community. It is clearly identified by the performers in the studio that he is inside a continuing exploration of the healing possibilities of the choreographic process, supported by the dramaturgical one, that will result in Begin Again being brought to the community in May as a direct reaction to and acknowledgement of pandemic trauma that has been inspired by thinking on a historically racist continuum.
- Marie