an ode to dance

this post has been a long time coming! i wanted to write about dance in order to think consciously about what it means to me, as weird as it feels writing about an art form rather than practicing it..

(sorry the writing here is pretty messy bc i just word vomited teehee)

happy accidents

i accidentally started dancing when i was just 3 years old. my parents, like any other chinese-american parents in a relatively affluent neighborhood, signed me up for way too many after-school activities. dance, swimming, skating, drawing lessons, piano lessons, chinese school, you name it. my parents signed me up for chinese dance first, maybe because they wanted to make sure i stayed connected to my heritage, maybe because they wanted to make sure i got exercise, and maybe because it was what they had heard about from other chinese parents in the circles. either way, i remember sitting in class for the first time with my barely strung together pigtails, tights, and untied ballet shoes, feeling nervous about stepping into the room at first and then never missing a class after that.

i instantly fell in love with it. i don’t even remember asking my parents asking whether or not i could keep dancing. it just felt like a given that i would keep moving. i loved the artistry and the athleticism, i loved the physical training but i also loved the way certain movements looked. i loved being able to perform and be on stage. i loved the way that the stage gave me an excuse to be perceived and also to try to be perceived. since i was young, i’ve always been pretty averse to trying to gain attention from others, whether that was because i didn’t really understand the people around me who i would notice doing it in social settings, or because i was afraid of taking up space. either way, dance became an outlet for me to be able to take up space and say “here i am”.

the start of my relationship with dance

i grew up doing chinese dance, ballet, jazz in a children’s studio setting, each taking a few hours a week. while some of my childhood friends were from dance, i didn’t end up feeling deeply connected to them, at least not as much as i felt connected to the math community. there also wasn’t as much self-organizing among us, and we sort of just showed up to class together and did what the teacher told us to do. consequently, i never really had a huge reason to think about dance for the community it created. but a huge part of this was definitely in the way that i saw myself in relation to the world. it’s easy enough to fixate on thinking about yourself as a growing adolescent and all, and on top of that i have a pretty individualistic personality. my brain often focused on the differences i felt between the people around me.

the way i thought about dance growing up ended up being pretty harmful to me later on in life (and continues to be something that i’m trying to grow out of). dance back then was about executing things perfectly and being the best dancer in the room, all just to win the praise and favoritism from my dance teachers. it was frankly a very chinese way of teaching and learning, where “good” students get praised and “bad” students get shamed. i wanted to be “good”, but i let this notion of good be defined by other people rather than my individual growth and relationship with dance. there was very little agency — i didn’t choose the classes i took or the styles i did, i just kept doing what i was comfortable with and good at. i definitely grew a lot as a choreography dancer but didn’t think too deeply about it.

college

the transition into college dance wasn’t all that huge in the beginning. i found ADT and fixation, which allowed me to continue chinese dance and stay within familiar styles (since fixation’s contemporary is pretty influenced by ballet, jazz, modern, and more “classical” styles of dance). even when i joined donk for the first time, i didnt understand the concept of a choreo team vs. a non-choreo team. i didn’t know that hip hop was its own style of dance separate from other street styles like street jazz, house, waacking, breaking, etc. that often inspire what is known as “hip hop dance” to a commercial audience. i didnt know any of the historical context around hip hop as a culture beyond just dance. i just saw dance in the same way as i did growing up: you can get a group of people together to learn and perform a piece of choreography for an audience.

creation

the first time i choreographed (for fixation), it felt like my brain was going to explode. up until then, i had never had a chance to make something of my own — in my studio, we were taught to learn combinations and regurgitate them, rehearsing over and over again until it was clean enough to perform at our end-of-year showcase. we weren’t taught to think about performance art as an art, only as a performance. i ended up using a lot of moves inspired both by chinese dance and by moves i had seen other contemporary dancers (lucy valley, my absolute inspiration) use. i hadn’t yet created my own style or explored how my body liked to move, and i had very little movement vocabulary to play with.

i went from choreographing more and more for fixation set, to becoming artistic director, to choreographing full pieces for fixation show. from choreographing so much, and maybe just from being in the dance community for so long, the typical praises that you hear jumping around the dance community after performances — “you’re so good!”, “omg you’re so slay”, “you ateee” — began fading into the background. these words felt like they didn’t have meaning anymore, partly because it was so common (which i don’t think is a bad thing - i think you can have a lot of love for people and mean it every time) but partly because i didn’t really care about getting that validation anymore. i just barely remember the exhilaration i got from getting external approval for my dancing for the first time in college, a refreshing change from the lone criticism that was so common in the dance environments i grew up in. that feeling faded away fast. i no longer cared about whether or not i looked good while performing, or whether or not people thought i was a good dancer. i wanted to dance for myself. i wanted to create things that i liked. i wanted to make art.

inside out

dance felt like it became less and less about myself and more and more about the community. i no longer thought about things like receiving comments of support from people after performances. i no longer thought about things like how many people came to my workshops. i stopped pubbing them as much too (which i now regret because i realize they are still a wonderful opportunity to get people together and create community). i no longer cared about being in a lot of dances and performing as much as i could for an audience (hence why i stopped dancing for ADT).

i cared about exploring choreography, and in particular pushing myself to do very contrasting styles, more as way to understand the art form more deeply. learning other people’s choreography felt the same as listening to other musicians when i studied jazz, but generating my own choreography felt like playing jazz.

i cared about being part of communities. i cared about helping with the gritty behind the scenes work that people don’t talk about as much, even if it wasn’t my formal job description. i cared about making sure the things that weren’t part of anyone’s job description got done, the cute traditions the dance community has of getting people gifts and showing their love, and making sure the people that are too busy thanking other people also get thanked.

i cared about making sure to continue the community norms and traditions that i valued. something that took a lot of conscious effort in the beginning for me was cheering for people whenever they were performing or teaching workshops. anyone who knows me knows i’m generally a very quiet person. but when i’m in a leadership position, explicit or not, i try my best to become more warm and extroverted than my default state. i try my best to put my ego away, in the form of self-consciousness, in an effort to create love within the community. this applies to being in the dance community, being a choreographer, or being a counselor for ACE. i hope that i influenced at least some of the younger people to haggle their friends and be ok with being LOUD and SUPPORTIVE for their friends. dance taught me what it can mean to show love and support to each other while putting away your fear of being perceived as foolish, or being perceived at all.

when i stopped caring as much about becoming an artist within the art form called dance, i was able to care more about dance for the art form itself. and a large part of what dance means as an art form is the beauty of community formation that it brings, and how communities can create things that you wouldn’t be able to alone. quite literally, there are certain large group dynamics in dance that are devastatingly beautiful and also impossible to recreate with few people. but there are also certain systems that would be unsustainable without people showing up to power them — thinking about workshops and classes, boston-wide showcases, and sessions. and it takes more than one person to form a relationship.

thinking about the power of community

it wasn’t until my last couple semesters that i really noticed some other ways of caring for the community that i hadn’t considered before: showing up to friends’ workshops, bringing them along to go to boston-area dance events, and also just caring deeply for your dance friends through acts of service because you feel a heart-tugging pain when you think about the sheer amount of service they have given the dance community behind the scenes. i’ve seen people buy snacks and drinks to celebrate team members’ birthdays. i’ve seen more post-dance hangouts this past semester than i’ve ever seen before. i’ve seen the growth and blossoming of a huge boston dance community group chat, where people have been posting resources, workshops, and classes happening in the area that many people may not have known about before. i’ve seen dancers show up to protests with their dancer friends.

i’m still working on finding a good balance for myself, but i think the dance community has taught me what it means to show up for people in times of need.

how it’s kept me thinking about the social

a big part of working along the lines of social justice is being able to think about people other than yourself, being able to show up for other people, and being willing to spend your time and energy for material benefits of someone that isn’t just you, because you care about them. the way that people in the dance community have shown me how to show up for people directly mirrors that same type of love i see in community organizing: showing up to your neighbor’s door when they’re being threatened for eviction, showing up in solidarity for the service workers at MIT and fighting for fair wages amidst the crazy inflation and living costs in cambridge, showing up in protest against the injustices happening in gaza.

being in the dance space has inevitably kept me thinking about humans beyond the individual self and how one can stand in solidarity with them (also as a way to respect the art form). being more and more involved in the hip hop-inspired sides of MIT, and thinking about what the term “hip hop-inspired” means, has also solidified the feeling that i want to work on social and economic justice within cambridge/boston (more on this later). i think anyone who has been very involved in the arts can understand this: so much of art and art’s influence in the US is fundamentally born from disinvested black and brown communities. i’m thinking about how i grew up playing jazz, which was born from african-american communities in new orleans during the late 1800s/early 1900s. i’m thinking about how hip hop culture, and hip hop dance as part of that, was created by black and brown teens in the bronx during the early 1970s. i’m thinking about how i grew up dancing kpop dances for fun, much of which is influenced by various street dances cultures pioneered by black and brown communities from new york to chicago to LA. i’m thinking about how now i do so much hip hop-inspired choreo, which follows the same story.

in thinking about the history of these art forms — being born from and pioneered by black and brown communities through struggle, functioning as a form of resistance, expression, and healthy community during times of pain — i can’t help but think about the broader history of america’s socioeconomic injustices, which has either disproportionately fallen onto people of color, if not just explicitly directed at people of color. even now, we can see this with mainstream pop culture’s exploitation of hip hop and black culture (in music, dance, fashion) without due credit. there is a lack of respect for the individuals whose labor has given people the art form to enjoy in the first place. we can see this in the way that the MIT community calls certain teams/dances within bigger groups hip hop when they were not hip hop, and generally neglect what a style really is.

so i think being in any sort of art community has kept me conscious about the social.

P.S. invest in arts education!

…for all the reasons above. in thinking about how dance taught me about valuing the arts and expressing myself, arts education can also give kids an outlet for creative expression. in thinking about how much dance taught me about how to create a community, arts education can show kids the power of being kind towards each other and valuing teamwork. on top of all of that, arts is a healthy activity can keep children from falling into poor mental health or other unhealthy past times. arts education can keep children socially conscious in a purely enjoyable way, and in a way that’s much deeper than learning about US history abstractly in the classroom.