How can we learn to heal from systemic violence in ways that are not suppressive, but expressive? This is the fundamental question that Lenora Lee posed in her talk titled Stories in Motion: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Dance Making on February 28 in the Pink Parlor in the East Duke building. Professor Jingqui Guan, Assistant Professor of the Practice of Dance invited Lee, the Artistic Director of Lenora Lee Dance, to discuss how she combines dance, history, and community as an artist.
In her talk, Lee showcased her unique interdisciplinary approaches in creative ways. She combined dance, writing, media, and discussion as a method to explore ways to process both the systemic violence and communal ties around us. She first opened her talk with a dancing exercise. It started with everyone mirroring her gestures, but who we were mirroring passed on and through others. This transfer of energy forced us to pay attention to each other to move together. The attendees eventually concluded by silently reflecting on the power of moving in tandem. It was an example of the communal movement that forms the basis of her large-scale, immersive, and interactive dance experiences.
According to Lee, her dances are informed directly by her lived experiences. Growing up third-generation Chinese American in the Bay Area in California, Lee touched on how she saw firsthand the oppression and conflict in her surrounding communities. She witnessed her community be challenged by assimilatory pressures, experience identitarian crises, and deal with the material realities of gun violence in their neighborhoods. These circumstances directly informed her methodological approaches, specifically in the importance she placed and continues to place on collaborations with advocacy and community-based organizations.
The primary basis of these collaborations combines different approaches to dance-making. She described dancing as a way to process and express deep emotions such as pain—pain that is communal, intergenerational, and deep-rooted. She screened her recent works which have addressed the heartbreak and distress surrounding migration, detention, and ICE. With three of her grandparents being detained at Angel Island, an island off the coast of California which detained primarily Asian migrants from 1910 to 1940, Lee spoke to the suffering that forced detention causes. This suffering continues to affect individuals and families today.
One of the pieces that she screened overlays dance with audio from interrogations of detainees in Angel Island. While dancers mimic falling around long, mess hall style tables that resemble where detainees would have eaten, there is a barrage of difficult, almost nonsensical question that the interrogator asks. Something as simple as not knowing the direction your former home faced, could have resulted in deportation. The blend of expressive dance and historical transcripts teach the viewer about the chronology of a community’s suffering without suppressing their experiences.
An audience member asked Lee how she even begins to undertake her projects that combine so many different media to tell such powerful stories. She described her process as beginning with the choreography, the dance movements, expressions, and staging itself, before overlaying the audio or music on top.
She had demonstrated earlier how dance could be layered over the recitation of writing. She asked an audience member read their personal experience working within immigration courts while she danced alongside it. Lee then asked the audience to write creatively too. Allowing the attendees the choice of three different prompts, relating to injustice, migration, or everyday beauty, she had each spend time answering them and then sharing aloud. Participants spoke on the everyday beauty in intimacy, the struggles of generational migration, and the persistence of injustice in detention and deportation.
Lee concluded her talk by addressing the tangible concerns surrounding funding for advocacy-based interdisciplinary work. The current political climate isn’t facilitating projects like hers and is an obstacle to other artists and researchers. She discussed how it’s more important than ever to come together, support each other, and build community to keep the dialogue going.