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- Choreographing Asian America
A critical study of Asian American performance and creative process
Poised at the intersection of Asian American studies and dance studies, Choreographing Asian America is the first book-length examination of the role of Orientalist discourse in shaping Asian Americanist entanglements with U.S. modern dance history. Moving beyond the acknowledgement that modern dance has its roots in Orientalist appropriation, Yutian Wong considers the effect that invisible Orientalism has on the reception of work by Asian American choreographers and the conceptualization of Asian American performance as a category. Drawing on ethnographic and choreographic research methods, the author follows the work of Club O' Noodles—a Vietnamese American performance ensemble—to understand how Asian American artists respond to competing narratives of representation, aesthetics, and social activism that often frame the production of Asian American performance.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Situating Asian American Dance Studies
Club O' Noodles' Laughter from the Children of War
Rehearsing the Collective: A Performative Autoethnography
Interlude The Amazing Chinese American Acrobat: Choreography as Methodology
Mapping Membership: Class, Ethnicity, and the Making of Stories from a Nail Salon
Writing Nail Salon
Pedagogy of the Scantily Clad:
Studying Miss Saigon in the Twenty-first Century
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
YUTIAN WONG is an assistant professor in the School of Music and Dance at San Francisco State University.
"(Y)ou will learn a different process to making art from Yutian Wong's book. I strongly recommend it."
~Bernadine Jennings, Attitude: The Dancers' Magazine
"Choreographing Asian America takes us on an engrossing journey through Asian American dance and politics. Wong makes clear that dance has been woefully neglected in the growing scholarship in Asian American cultural criticism. Moving from the history of the 'Oriental dancing girl' to an extended analysis of Vietnamese American performance collective Club O'Noodles to the overbearing popularity of Miss Saigon, she lays out the challenges of writing about dance and performance in corporeal and kinetic terms. At times personal, philosophical, irreverent, and somber, Wong engages the most basic questions of Asian American bodies, movements, representation, desire, and dance."
~Josephine Lee, author of Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage
"Choreographing Asian America deftly brings Asian American race/ethnicity studies and contemporary U.S. dance studies together and inaugurates a new (but long-overdue) field of Asian American dance studies. Wong's nuanced ethnographic approach to the work of Club O' Noodles gives us a richer understanding of Asian American performance's aesthetic and political possibilities."
~Karen Shimakawa, Performance Studies, NYU
"Choreographing Asian America takes us on an engrossing journey through Asian American dance and politics. Wong makes clear that dance has been woefully neglected in the growing scholarship in Asian American cultural criticism. Moving from the history of the 'Oriental dancing girl' to an extended analysis of Vietnamese American performance collective Club O'Noodles to the overbearing popularity of Miss Saigon, she lays out the challenges of writing about dance and performance in corporeal and kinetic terms. At times personal, philosophical, irreverent, and somber, Wong engages the most basic questions of Asian American bodies, movements, representation, desire, and dance."
~Josephine Lee, author of Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage
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