I wanted to see the dances.
As a writer, I love to read, and as an aficionado of music, I love social dancing and have always appreciated the many different dance classes I’ve taken over the years. So, as I read SanSan Kwan’s book Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration, I was intrigued to visualize how the dance duets that Kwan describes between artists of drastically different ethnicities and dance traditions could come together to create something new, most of all a deeper understanding.
Over the course of this short, 110-page book, Kwan focuses on the love and empathy explored in six dance duets, including the dance she herself created with Vietnamese-born dance partner Hien Huynh as part of a larger dance piece called “Within These Walls,” a site-specific work documenting the lives of Chinese immigrants detained in the early 20th century at the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay. Key to Kwan and Huynh’s creative partnership was familiarity, respect, and trust, and the duo found that these elements can generate not just good art, but also a connection in the face of real-world experiences of prejudice and persecution.
Initially, the inspiration for Love Dances came when Kwan attended the duet between avant-garde French choreographer Jérôme Bel and Thai classical dancer Pichet Klunchun in 2007 and again in 2009. “I was at once intrigued and disturbed by the artists’ decision, for that duet, not to dance but to conduct a mutual interview,” Kwan said. “That choice, as well as the resulting performance, raised a whole host of questions for me about the ethics and politics, the power dynamics, as well as the earnest desires inherent in intercultural collaboration.”
In the body of the book, Kwan examines the duets created by African American hip-hop choreographer Rennie Harris and Japanese American butoh-based interdisciplinary dancer Michael Sakamoto, in “Flash,” and by Argentinian contemporary and kabuki dancer Daniel Proietto and Japanese Flamenco dancer Kojima Shōji in “Simulacrum.” Kwan also digs into the work of Vietnamese French choreographer Emmanuelle Huynh, particularly her duets with Japanese butoh artist Kasai Akira in “Spiel,” and with Japanese butoh-informed dancer Otake Eiko in “Talking Duet.”
“Flash” addresses anti-Asian and anti-Black racist violence and trauma, looking toward ways of finding healing through cross-cultural empathy. Meanwhile, “Simulacrum” looks at the personal histories of its two dancers, Shōji and Daniel Proietto, emphasizing what they “had to get used to,” including being taken from his mother to be raised by his uncle, in Shōji’s case, and growing up in poverty in Buenos Aires and searching worldwide to find a dance tradition in which he felt comfortable, in Proietto’s case.
In contrast, “Spiel” and “Talking Duet” both center improvisation, which deemphasizes fixed choreography and memorized mastery in favor of responsiveness in the moment. Instead of perfection, or even repeatability, these two performances highlight the importance of the intercultural encounter, and Kwan’s chapter on them stresses how connection and love can be messy and complicated, but ultimately worth attempting.
Throughout her discussions, Kwan puts these East-West dances in context. Dance doesn’t occur in a magical vacuum, and in her epilogue, titled “The Wages of Dying is Love,” a line borrowed from a poem by Galway Kinnell, Kwan acknowledges that she began writing this book in 2016 as Donald Trump was elected president and that she finished writing her book in November 2020, just as the next presidential election was taking place. She foregrounded the Brexit referendum, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the related anti-Asian racism and economic disruptions that emerged.
Among all this of pain and harm, Kwan considers the place of dance. She acknowledges that it can seem insufficient, and that creating love out of dance is extremely difficult. But she sees moving together as a means for mourning together, and for developing and sharing the compassion that can combat distance.
Thankfully, technology has also helped to lessen distance: The combination of video and the internet has allowed me to view what Kwan discusses, including “Spiel,” the improvised partnership between Huynh and Akira, a portion of “Flash” by Harris and Sakamoto, plus a short snippet from “Simulacrum,” featuring flamenco steps by Shōji in rehearsal, and a longer excerpt from the staged version.
Love Dances was published in September 2021, and at the time, Kwan held out hope that love through dance could be powerful in addressing the global political challenges we face. “My perspective on what dance can do, what love (meaning care, empathy, deep listening, openness to failure and to misunderstanding, radical acceptance, vulnerability) can do, has not changed,” Kwan said recently. “Of course, the global political challenges remain, with perhaps different contours, or different regional hotspots, or new bad actors. But I still think dance and dancers can be powerful models for ethical behavior.”
With that perspective, Kwan has been busy in the past year. “I just published an article chronicling my experience working on a dance piece, about the history of a public housing complex in San Francisco Chinatown, that was supposed to be immersive and site-specific but that, because of the pandemic, shifted to a dance film,” she relayed. “The article explores questions about presence in performance and ideas about immersivity done otherwise.”
And that’s not all. “I also co-edited a special journal issue on dance in the aftermath of COVID-19 anti-Asian violence,” Kwan said. “The issue will come out sometime later this month in the journal Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies.”
Kwan also has plans that will be of interest in the future. “I’m working on some research around the potentiality of a politics of ‘passivity’ in Asian American performance,” she shared, and invited readers to reach out to her at UC Berkeley.
Love Dances is ultimately hopeful, which may be unsurprising for a scholar such as Kwan, who also maintains an active dance career, and it all makes me want to look at the calendar listings for local dance performances coming up this season.
