EntryWaves
CanAsian Dance in a new partnership with Toronto Dance Theatre (TDT) for the 2024/25 season presents EntryWavesa pilot project open to any artist who identifies as being from the Asian Diaspora and who could benefit from free rehearsal space and time to work on their project or develop their practice.
Open to emerging to established, who practice traditional forms and lineages, contemporary and experimental approaches, street dance forms and everything in between.
6 artists will be offered, week-long, half-day residencies in the studio spaces of the Winchester Street Theatre during the Fall/Winter of 2024.
CanAsian and TDT are dedicated to bringing together Dance and community through creative and easy-to-participate programs that hold value in supporting critical artistic conversations and exploratory stages of new works. This is the first of many other partnerships to come as we build our relationship and strengthen solidarity to be able to offer more creative exchanges, knowledge-sharing representation and connection for the Asian Diaspora dance community and the greater dance community at large.
The EntryWaves residency is supporting my research film project, routes and stems. The work investigates transcultural relations within the beyond-genetic kinship of sisters and the translations of their Hakka-Chinese given names. In collaboration with interdisciplinary artist, Aysia Tse, we will explore partnering movements created through playful analysis of recorded intergenerational conversations, as well as the gestures, pictorial physicality, and meaning of Chinese characters. In connection to our ancestral and personal migration routes, we will explore listening exchanges as a practice of integrating my elders' own diasporic experiences with the stems of my own.
I am hoping this residency can support the development of “Pahinga ka muna”, a choreographic narrative that traces the mad and queer routes of my Filipinx diasporic inspirations. Prompted by disability and racial justice calls to return to rest as an activist space of dreaming and worldmaking, I share my dance practice/ritual/performance inspired by the Tagalog term pahinga, which means to rest. I return to the roots of such rest by interpreting my movements through hinga—breath. I am returned to my gesture of breathing as a source of creative and embodied energy, while also becoming a space of tension, pain, and discomfort through asthma and anxiety, through COVID depression surrounded by wild-fires raging across Turtle Island. In particular, this residency would provide the space and time for workshops wherein I will be developing the poetic forms of audio description that become both the access measures and the choreographic scores that invite audiences to join me in this ritual of navigating colonial being amidst syncopations of queer/mad/diasporic becomings. A performance of this work in process has been curated to be presented as part of DanceWorks’s “Swirl/Unfurl” works-in-process mini festival that will be held in May of 2025.
This Entrywaves residency explores a WIP created through a recent initial research and creation phase in Laos and Cambodia, and created in collaboration with Peter Chin. This work celebrates the enduring art form of textiles as a fundamental expression of personal and cultural identity and forms a blanket of reconnection, embracing a journey back to home. This residency will explore the weaving of a Canadian perspective back into the piece, as well as support the work into its next phases of life.
I acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts in funding this work.
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Funding is provided from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council.