Photos Credits: Two Doors by Robbie Sweeny | Unbound by Matt Haber
By Kimiko Guthrie
Last week, I was thrilled to sit down in person with artists Claudine Naganuma and SanSan Kwan to discuss their upcoming project, Threshold. Our conversation explored a wide range of topics, from re-examining the Asian American trope of passivity to the political activist Yuri Kochiyama to the need for both anger and radical love in healing ourselves and our planet. Catch a performance in Davis at the Mondavi Studio Theater on October 18-20, 2024. Purchase tickets here.
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Kimiko Guthrie (KG): I thought it might be great to start with each of you talking about these new pieces of yours, Unbound and Two Doors, and to share what inspired you to make these works.
Claudine Naganuma (CN): I'm really honored that we were invited to work with the Anti-Asian Violence: Origins and Trajectories project. SanSan, maybe you want to talk a little bit about what that is?
SanSan Kwan (SK): A group of researchers across UC campuses got together to write a grant proposal. They were awarded this grant, which is a UC wide multi Campus Research Grant, to study anti-Asian violence, origins and trajectories. It was a big grant. The main purpose was to get a group of scholars together, host symposia, host panels, and publish a special issue of the Amerasia journal. But the principal investigators thought that it would also be really important, especially given the subject matter, to have some kind of creative and embodied response to the topic of anti-Asian violence. So, they put out a call for choreography and sought out other genres of art. Claudine and I both applied and we were selected.
CN: When I think about origins of anti-Asian sentiment and violence, it is so easy for me to go back to my own personal traumas and all of the dances that I've created before, around the incarceration of my father at Gila River Reservation when he was 12, and my mom's experience of being locked up in Angel Island and being separated from her mother from Hong Kong, then living here and that whole passing on of that generational trauma. Anti exclusionary laws have fueled this face of yellow peril that just keeps changing. I think for me the work is really informed by some of those earlier explorations. How do we get set up to deal with these things if we ourselves are holding ourselves back, in some ways, to like these ideas of “three obediences” and all of these - like being a good daughter and a filial daughter…And that doesn't really set us up necessarily for dealing with anti-Asian violence very well.
So how do we flip that narrative a little bit? I've been really pondering on what the trajectories are; what is the magic bullet or the antidote? What's the antidote to all of this anti-Asian hate? It’s not just up to Asians and Asian Americans. I feel like it's for all of us. We're in a time right now where we are inundated by so much injustice, and a lot of times I think we are at capacity and cannot actually process all of this.
I feel really privileged to be able to process this through art. One of the programs that dNaga offers is The Girl Project, as well as our Dance for Parkinson's Project. I feel like a lot of what we do with these programs is really about taking up space and giving permission for us to care for ourselves, so that we can have the capacity to care for others. I know I'm not the only person saying that out there right now. We all are really kind of realizing that the grind that we are doing, or the pace in which we are living, is not conducive to our personal freedom and liberation. So when we can care for ourselves and grow that gratitude and capacity to care for ourselves, I think then we can work in unity with others, in solidarity, making grassroots change. The seeds of that change are liberation and freedom and care and love–and I know a lot of people don't like to talk about love. It's a weird word for people. But it is powerful.
KG: We talk about hate a lot, right?
CN: We talk about hate a lot, right. But I love what I was talking about with Akemi Kochiyama, who is Yuri Kochiyama’s granddaughter, when we did our pilgrimage to a Japanese American incarceration site with Tadaima - we were like, you know, we're not connected because of our common oppression. We are connected because of our common love.
KG: Mmm, right. SanSan, can you talk a little bit about your piece and what it’s about for you in relation to our current time?
SK: I first want to say how much I love what Claudine said and I agree with the sentiment that it's just such a privilege to get to process this serious phenomenon of anti-Asian violence through the work. I feel it's been a really enriching journey for not just me, but the dancers as well, and the other folks involved in this process to get an opportunity to think through our experiences and our relationship to the phenomenon of anti-Asian violence.
I'll first frame this by saying that my other identity is as a dance scholar. I had been writing about Asian American dance and Asian American performance for a long time, but parallel to that I have also been dancing, mostly with Asian American choreographers, including Lenora Lee Dance for the last 13 years. This has been the first opportunity for me to stretch into choreography, and it just made so much sense when I learned about the call. I don't know that I would necessarily have as organically transitioned into choreography if it weren't for a call for a work about anti-Asian violence. It just felt so present and so meaningful for me. Immediately I had ideas about what I wanted to do.
So in my scholarship, I have been thinking about passivity as an Asian American trope that tends to get negative connotations, but wondering how we can think of a politics and an aesthetics of passivity that might recuperate the term and help us understand it in a more nuanced way. When I initially saw the call, I started to wonder, could my research on, my theorizing about passivity as an Asian American aesthetic be something that I could also put into practice myself as a choreographer. That was my initial impetus.
I don't know yet in a really direct way whether that's happening in the piece. The piece explores the range of responses and emotions that we have in the aftermath of violence. It's called Two Doors and it's inspired by the incident in New York City during the pandemic, in which an Asian American woman–a Filipina woman–is caught on a surveillance camera from the lobby of a building. She's caught on film being attacked on the sidewalk. What was so striking about that incident is that the doormen are in the lobby and you can see them watching the attack. After the attacker leaves, the doormen go and close the doors to the building rather than go out to help her. Eventually they do go to help her, but obviously the striking moment is when they close the doors. I decided to work with that incident as a way to think through how we respond to incidents of violence. How do we see ourselves in those situations especially as Asian American and Asian American femme folks and what is the aftermath? What are all the feelings that we have had over the last few years in this spike of anti-Asian violence? What are the range of emotions that we feel, from fear to grief, to defiance, to healing, to resilience–all of those things. So the piece explores all of that.
KG: You both spoke about the “three obediences” and passivity, these tropes, but you also talked about…maybe like reclaiming, or I forget the word that you used, it was great.
CN: Did you say recuperate?
SK: Uh-huh. Yeah.
KG: Recuperate! I love that because you can get a sense of healing in the body. I would love to hear just briefly your thoughts about how much of these ideas you think are projected onto us from mainstream American society, and how much are maybe genuine issues from our own various Asian cultures? That space between stereotypes and tropes and then things that are actually true, but maybe selectively viewed in order to justify certain legislature and racist structures. And what we do need to work on from the inside.
SK: I think I'm still struggling with all of the different valences that passivity can have. I think that imagining Asian Americans as passive is what allows us to be attacked, which is what makes us targets of violence. And it's the sort of place that we hold within a kind of larger, like racial taxonomy in the United States. I think that the research I was trying to do in my scholarship was to think about other ways in which passivity might not be a negative valence, but actually a politically efficacious one. And to think about passivity hand in hand with things like hospitality, generosity, compassion, and care. So that's what I mean by recuperating a notion of passivity, about obediences.
KG: There can also be wisdom and strength in passivity, like you can think of maybe an older person being less reactive.
SK: Right? Right, exactly. How might practicing passivity actually be a good thing, instead of a negative? With the piece I'm working on, I decided not to actively try in some literal way to think about passivity because I didn't want my piece to be super avant garde. In other words, I didn't want nothing to happen on stage. So I'm still working through whether I'm actually employing an aesthetics of passivity in this piece in particular, maybe in a future piece. But certainly, yes, I think that passivity can have all of these different valences.
KG: Right, like a mountain could been seen as passive.
SK: I'm not saying that there are not problematic ways in which passivity does not serve us, but I'm just wondering whether there are other ways that we can think about it.
KG: You want to speak to that at all, Claudine?
CN: I don't know. I mean, I really love thinking about it. I think for me, and this is maybe not in response to that, actually, but I feel like all of those things that happened to my family got handed down to me like ghosts. So we didn't really talk about it. And those things, in some ways, also kind of have made me really angry, especially when I was younger. I was very, very angry. Also the injustice of always being told, go back to your own country, even though I was born in San Francisco. So that kind of reaction.
And then how do I deal with the anger that's coming towards us, as well? Both of us have references to assault. And then, just the tremendous amount of grief in that, and I know that we're both taking very good care of our dancers because we don't want to re-traumatize them as we're working on this. So what’s some trauma stewardship - like just trying to figure out ways to process that trauma, metabolize it and then be able to move on. And that, like you were saying these different stages, right, of this grief and anger that happens and I was told not to be angry quite a bit, you know that a good person really doesn't really get too angry. It's not one of the things we aspire to do. It takes us down.
I am enjoying being able to explore that I think that especially women need to be able to express aggressive, not necessarily angry, but aggressive movement vocabulary. And so that's kind of a fun thing to do. I think in dealing with that anger and grief on the other side of that is breath, which we both are really incorporating quite a bit, using breath as a way to heal. It's such a valuable commodity to have clean air right now. And all of the stuff about breathing and folks who are not allowed to breathe or have a challenge breathing. It's a giant metaphor for me that this country is choking. The world is choking.
KG: This brings me to two other questions on my mind right now. Maybe one a little more personal. I really admire, SanSan, that you're doing something new. I was surprised when I saw in your biography that it’s your first time as an Artistic Director. My mom is almost 89 and she just learned how to swim recently. She's always trying new things and I think it's so important. So you've been deep into your work as a dance scholar for a long time now. Could you talk about the differences between the more intellectual thinking about ideas (that you’ve been doing) versus the more corporeal, somatic experience of making this dance? It sounds like your work is really looking at that. Claudine’s talk about breath reminded me of that difference.
And then Claudine, even though you've been choreographing for decades, I was also interested in how you came to so clearly center your work around issues of marginalized voices and Asian American identity. Did you come to dance as a way to express the issues you care about, or did you come to it separately, with more choreographic concerns, like time and space and other elements of dance? Or has your work as a choreographer always been tied to your Asian American identity?
CN: I think that probably even my very first piece that I did, which actually Wayne Hazzard produced at Dancers’ Group on 22nd and Mission back in the day, was called Trash. It had to do with the enormous amount of plastic that we were having, and I started collecting plastic like a crazy maniac and made enough to create a backdrop. Another time I just collected so many papers, and it was about unhoused people. So I think that it's really interesting that you asked that because you know when I think back on it, it does tend to be some issue that is bothering me or that I need to understand a little bit better and pick apart and the dancers always inform that process so much.
In this particular process, I'm so excited because many of the dancers that I've been working with trained with me at Danspace. I think Catalina started when she was around five years old with me. And so now they're in their, what, 20s and 30s? It's really amazing to have them–It feels like coming home. It's the same old movement vocabulary, but just amped up, times two squared. They're really leading me now because they're asking questions and they didn't really learn about Camp, and they didn’t really learn about immigration. “Who is Yuri Kochiyama?” So it's really great to relearn it through their eyes.
I also hired an actress, Sharon Shao –I've always wanted to have my narrative a little bit tighter. I usually work in such an abstract manner and sometimes people get out of there and go, “Well, what the heck is that about?” I really don't expect or want everyone to understand absolutely everything that’s happening. But I think that for this particular piece, knowing that it was going to be performed for mostly students, I really created a piece that hopefully they'll be able to really sink their teeth into, and hopefully go away and think about some of these ideas and hopefully influence the way that they're looking at different faces.
KG: And then back to the question for SanSan.
SK: I think it was a question about my transition or my stepping into the role of choreographer. I've been a dancer almost my whole life and I've been a dance scholar for half my life. So in some ways, it felt very organic and natural. What I learned is that composing writing is not dissimilar from composing a dance piece. The vocabulary is different. The tools are different, but still a lot of the same rules apply. So I feel like in some ways, it just made so much sense. It was like I was drafting a chapter. And then of course, as dancers in contemporary dance, we're always making phrases; we're always contributing to the actual choreography, so that part was not at all difficult to step into. The thing that I had never done myself was actually do the composition and think about all of the other components, the design components and stuff like that. But again, I feel like I've been in the world enough that it wasn't so weird, and it really felt like I was drafting a composition the same way that I do a journal article.
KG: Right, right. What's the biggest difference to you, and what do you feel like you're getting from this process, that you couldn’t have gotten from, say, writing a paper?
SK: Well, it's more collaborative, which I think is exciting and fun. I'm really finding that when I map out my day, I would much rather be thinking about my piece than thinking about scholarship right now. So it's been really rewarding and fun. I think the collaborative aspect of it is really rewarding. Because when you're doing research, you're just sitting there by yourself.
KG: Your words don’t talk back to you (both chuckle).
I had a question about your relationship. I would love to hear how you met and have you collaborated before or is this the first time? And now that you've probably seen each other's pieces and processes, how do you feel your work complements each other and how is it different in an interesting way for an audience?
CN: I don't usually hang out in the world of scholarship, and so it's been very, very interesting to get a chance to talk to all these scholars, and I have been really digging it. Like a lot of times, I'll be having a conversation and then, I’m like, I don't know what they just said! And then I go away and I'm like, “Hmm, and I've been noticing that we're all seeing things using different words, but it seems to me that we're pretty dang aligned.” And I'm not just talking about science. I'm also talking about the researchers and their work and their descriptions of their classes in the syllabi; it feels like we are all trying to do the same thing.
SK: Yes.
CN: We're trying to really make a change and inspire people to not only learn about the past, but to take responsibility and ownership of their future. I really love that. And I actually really adore them; they probably don't even know that! SanSan is awesome! And, I really love your piece. A lot.
The other day you said Suzette asked if we wanted to meet together and talk about it, but actually our pieces are quite aligned in that we are both dealing with some kind of an assault, but then somehow that healing breath is there. It really does feel like we're doing a transformation together and also a ritual of some sort.
KG: And you didn’t talk about it - you didn’t say, “Let’s both use breath?”
SK: Yes, that was Suzette's question. She was like, “Did you collaborate and decide how your pieces were going to align with each other?” But we didn't at all. So we met basically through this project. I'd certainly known about Claudine, and we have a lot of people that we know in common, but I've never seen her work before and she obviously had never seen mine.
KG: So you all did a show. Was that in July?
CN: July – I did a workshop.
SK: Yes, a work in progress kind of thing. So I went to see that and I remember walking away being like, oh, so complementary. What I love about it is that aesthetically they're different. But I think putting them together on the same program, they're working on the same project. And there are some things that are threads, like the breath and ritual.
What I love is that Claudine is thinking on a broad scale about origins and trajectories. And mine is kind of more of a moment in time, I think. But I think that that's great. So you have the kind of broad scale and you have the large and the small. So yes, I think it's going to be a really cool program. I think the order of that makes sense. I think it will be really, good especially for students in Asian American studies.
KG: I guess your publicity images and descriptions are working really well because I got that sense of the kind of expansive explorations of your piece, Claudine, and then the heightened moment of SanSan’s, really going into the idea of that moment of the body.
I think you've said somewhere in the publicity about looking at anti-Asian violence through a feminist lens, and I feel like maybe that’s sort of a given with both of your works and careers, but I’d love for you to talk a little bit about why you want to tell audiences that this is from a feminist perspective.
SK: The recent spate of attacks have been mostly targeting femme folks and older folks. So for me, it felt really important to speak from that perspective about the phenomenon. It's the perspective that I know. I do feel like Asian American femme experiences are distinct from Asian American male experiences, so it just felt right to speak from a feminist lens. And think about especially if I want to be asking questions about the possible efficacious valence of passivity. I think passivity is a trope that's more ascribed to Asian American femme folks than it is to Asian American men. I mean not exclusively…
KG: Yes, it has its own flavor.
SK: And I wanted it all to be femme dancers. So many of the conversations we had in the making process were about “Oh, my husband wants me to go take self defense classes.” There was a certain kind of shared set of experiences.
KG: Thinking again about Yuri Kochiyama - in part, she’s famous for her work with allies, like with the Black community during the Civil Rights Movement. And there's a phrase somewhere in your publicity about “collective liberation.” Do you want to speak to how you feel anti-Asian violence fits in with the struggles of other groups of color in this country?
CN: I guess I'll just say that the incident of the assault that I am inspired by, is actually based on Yuri’s son getting assaulted near Oakland Chinatown. So, the fact that this wonderful activist who has inspired so many people, her son was attacked - what happens when someone you know is actually attacked by somebody? And then the media portrays that it is mostly African Americans who are perpetrating these things, when actually 70% of anti-Asian violent crimes are actually conducted by white people. So, for me, it's a little skewed how the media continues to manipulate the story.
This idea of this constant rebranding needs to happen, just like they call it the relocation center when we know that they are concentration camps, and when they say it's the ICE detention center, we know that they're actually cages. So it is really important that we blow that myth out of the water.
I think we're lucky in Oakland, right? I live in Oakland and work in Oakland, and we're in a unique place, I feel. I have a lot of folks in my community that are a development of intergenerational and interracial sisterhood that I'm falling back on. And in some ways, I think that this is kind of a key for how we level up as a global community, right? To me, Yuri really represented that, right? She always said, “Build bridges, not walls.”
KG: Did you have anything to add onto that, SanSan?
SK: I think that what Claudine is saying about this myth, that we need to blow out of the water, I think it's all part of a kind of larger white supremacist taxonomy of race that gets built where it's a kind of divide and conquer mentality. We have to not succumb to that kind of thinking where it's one marginalized group against another marginalized group instead of thinking about how white supremacy makes it bad for all of us but in different ways. I know in particular that this research project we are a part of really wants to think about abolition hand in hand with thinking about the origins and trajectories of anti-Asian violence. And to move away from the kind of more knee jerk or easy kind of blame game or cries for more policing or punitive measures and think more systematically about what is white supremacy doing. How is it operating such that anti-Asian violence is a phenomenon?
KG: Is there anything else you want to add that I haven't asked about? What’s next for each of you?
CN: I don’t know what’s yet. There's a lot. I always have seven dances every time I do one! So for example, my character goes to Tule Lake and then it was like, oh, the Modoc Nation was there. Then they eventually got displaced because of racist laws, and then ended up moving to Oklahoma. It's like, I just don't have the time and space to explore that.
I was like, oh, that might be the next dance. Like, of these locations of these camps, who was living there first, then who was living there second, and then when they got moved, then the Japanese, and then what happened?
So these layers and layers and layers and really it's about also caring for the land. These are all feminine ideas, right? Caring for the land, caring for each other, mothering ourselves, mothering each other. This kind of quality of care and kindness and love and compassion and generosity. Where is that now when it is very much needed?
KG: I loved that you talked about embracing anger and aggression and love. I see those as connected. If you shut off one part of yourself, how are you going to access the others?
SK: Yes, that’s a good point. That’s great.
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Download a copy of the interview here:
Kimiko Guthrie Claudine Naganuma and SanSan Kwan in Conversation (October 2024)