Dana on film!

Here is Dana while filming a PSA on being Asian American in DC for the Office of the Mayor of DC

DTSB&Co sighting at the National Cherry Blossom Festival

Washington, DC mayor Vincent C. Gray speaks at the opening of the National Cherry Blossom Festival below larger than life photos of DTSB&Co company members!

Musings on Muses

Our 20th Anniversary Season shows are April 5-6 at the Marvin Center Betts Theatre!

As I look back at the last 20 years I am struck by the wonderful dancers and designers who I have had the honor to work with.  It is an amazingly generous feat for a dancer to give their youth to a choreographer and to believe in an aesthetic.  A dancer's life is amazingly short and I have worked with so many beautiful dancers over the years who have given their talent and youth to allowing me to create work on them.  These dancers include Sarah Craft my amazing dance partner for many years and confident who found her way to the first wave of DTSB&Co at only 16. What a gift she had. Her mother Polly was the early muse of  John Neumeier's, now the powerhouse of Hamburg. When I was at a very pivotal moment in my career Polly sponsored me  to visit Hamburg introduced me to John.  I flew to Hamburg to work with his school and sit in on his process. To see him in his prime at work was quite a gift.  I learned so much about the process of creating dances that speak to storytelling and the human experience.  He is  the archetypal scholar and storyteller of dance.

I am not sure what makes  a muse but Miyako Nitadori, Connie Fink, Kelly Southall and Ricardo Alvarez embody this quality for me. They have inspired essential dances for me from Island, to Charlie Chan and the Mystery of Love. I am thinking tonight how a choreographer finds dancers to embody their subconscious, the realm from which dances stem.  I keep a dream journal and devoutly follow Jungian archetypes.  These wonderful people embody archetypes for me from their dancing to the way they embrace life. 

I also have been ruminating on how designers change a choreographer's perspective.  I remember distinctly a conversation I had with Jennifer Tipton while working on a project with sculptor John Dreyfuss. She said, "remember light is an entity on stage as vital as another dancer,  if you project a relationship to light the audience will feel it completely".  Words to live by!  I never take the advice and talents of a designer lightly.  Also of major importance were my experiences with musical composer Jon Jang and visual designers Sara Brown and Laura McDonald. What generous people; they give completely to the process of dance.

Ultimately it takes a large community to breath life into the ephemeral form of dance. This communal process is what makes dance art.

Thank you!
Dana

International Dialogues

As I was showing Felipe Oyarzun, our new dancer from Santiago, Chile around DC today I started thinking about the importance of international dialogues.  I feel very lucky to have traveled with the company so much in the last 10 years because it has expanded our network and opened our eyes as to how vital it is to engage in a global dialogue.  Dance is a universal language and to invest in relations with other countries is extremely important, especially for America right now.  It expands how I choreographically create work and informs how my work can speak to all cultures.  One of the major factors to learning how to choreograph effectively has been our travels and the many conversations we have had artists abroad. These travels and friendships help me create works that are universal vs. just American in aesthetic. I am in search of universal archetypes; I am very happy to support and sponsor our dance artists from Mongolia, Korea and Chile this year. I know that their experiences here will propel them and me  to new heights.  I especially look forward to our tour to Jordan in May.  Understanding the Middle East through the arts will help us all get along. It will continue a shared humanitarian conversation and allow our young dancers to further their careers in the near future. 

More soon! Dana

Friends of DTSB&Co Gather at Bistrot Lepic!

Cyrille Brenac, Congressman Mike Honda, Julie Koo and Dana

A wonderful event last night filled with friends of the company at Bistrot Lepic. The event announced our 20th Anniversary Season and was a fundraiser for our spring performances. It was wonderful of Congressman Mike Honda to attend.  He eloquently spoke about the dance company as the District's arts organization that allows young Asian Americans the chance to see and imagine a future in the arts.  After 20 years, it was truly wonderful to see so many familiar faces at the event and to remember that everyone in a community grows together. Our rehearsals are going very well and I can't wait for the big show on April 5 and 6!

How do we rebuild our DC dance community?

How do we rebuild our DC dance community?  Dance is an ephemeral art form, perhaps the most fragile of the arts and yet perhaps the oldest in terms of a global humanity.  Mankind danced before it wrote, before it painted or sculpted. So in many ways it is a precious link to a shared collective unconscious.  Dance has the capacity to bridge socio-economic and cultural differences.  But dance is fragile, it is here for the moment, slightly varies from presentation to presentation as well as time and financially intensive with very specific  rehearsal and theater space needs.
 
In Washington, DC over the past 5 years we have had a major wave of theater based capital campaigns which started pre-2008. As money from the District Government, Foundations and Corporations poured into buildings and the theater community, dance began to feel a drain of funds that were available for general operating funds and choreographic projects.  As the economy began to recess this strain increased.  So now we live with a new grouping of theater spaces without dance floors which are too expensive for the dance community to rent, with virtually no presenters for dance in the face of funders strained to upkeep  new  spaces.  Dance in DC is at risk and facing an all new Darwinian terrain. We must look for new models for management and funding quickly to ensure existing and new dance artists will survive and thrive.  I believe that we must explore shared management models which are not top heavy.  We must continue to explore innovative partnerships such as those with universities, museums, art galleries, schools and more.  Such partnerships can build audiences and create non traditional funding proposals and projects in non traditional spaces which can re-enliven our community.

Recently I began reaching out to directors of companies, art institutions and universities to explore new models for dance and have had some wonderful success including recent projects at the National Portrait Gallery and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The DC Metro Dance organization which has undergone a slow decline also has the potential to restructure at this time and be a clear lobbying voice for dance. If leaders in dance and other art forms can work together to create a clear concerted strategic plan for dance then we can structurally clarify milestones of stability and growth.  We also greatly need national support to become available to in DC.  Unlike NY we do not have the finance and large industry available to us. We are a government based city with a handful of foundations with art in their portfolios and an individual funding base which is often transient due to its relation to movement on the hill. Individuals often arrive and leave in a 4 year span. So we are in need of larger foundations such as Ford, Rockefeller, MacAurthur and Mellon to assist us at this time. We need to get the word out in a concerted effort. Otherwise even innovative partnerships will quickly hit a glass ceiling of support. As leaders in dance continue to talk I will be sharing info with you! Keep making dances!

2005 Tour to Latvia

Latvia...

In 2003 after a performance of our work Tracings which is about my family's history as plantation workers in Hawaii in the early 20th century, I was approached by a curator from the Latvian Opera house who was in the audience.  In 2005 the company toured to Riga.  It was our first time as a complete company tour in the Baltic States region.  We were the first contemporary company to perform in a beautiful black box space that was built into the Opera House complex.  We warmed up and rehearsed in a ballroom complete with chandeliers and a view of a snow covered square. 

Riga is a beautiful city because many of the original art nouveau buildings still exist there and were not destroyed during the WWII. We taught classes throughout the snowy city because modern dance was fairly new to Latvia at this time and people were hungry to see and understand what it is.  I have a great memory of teaching class at the Opera Ballet School where Baryshnikov originally trained.  We lay on the floor and I slid down to the mirrors as I demonstrated the movement combinations I kept tripping on the sharp incline because the studios were raked with the same angle as many of the older stages of European theaters.  

Riga is a city of Latvian culture at odds with new Russian values and aesthetics.  It has a rich artistic history and a burgeoning artistic potential. There is a deep melancholia and reserved aspect to its arts aesthetic which one can hear in many Baltic musical compositions today. I look forward to seeing more dance come from Latvia and the Baltic States in the future.  

--Dana 

Our History with Peru

Peru....The company has a 10 year history with Peru.  I was first asked to go to Peru by the US State Department when the director of the National Ballet of Peru was in search of a contemporary choreographer.  The director, Olga Shimasaki is a gifted Japanese Peruvian dance artist.  The Japanese Peruvians are similar to the plantation Japanese and Koreans of Hawaii in that they immigrated to Peru to be agricultural workers at the turn of the last century.  They have since become very involved in the arts landscape of Peru from dance to the visual and plastic arts.  Peru is a great love of mine because I don't think there is any other country in the world where an Asian immigrant family's child could have become President.  Fujimori was a fascinating individual that represents the cultural openness and fluidity of the Peruvian psyche.

After my first travels to Peru when I set repertory work on the ballet, I returned to create Accoralada or corralled to a live orchestra.  It was my first experience with a full live orchestra, an experience which is almost unheard of anymore in dance in America due to cost limitations of the music union.  I learned so much and even collaborated with a Japanese Peruvian visual artist on the set design.  I was in a constant deja vu state in Lima because it felt so much like Santa Fe, NM where I grew up, also a colony of Spain, that I returned through two consecutive Fulbrights to make works for the San Marcos Ballet where I also taught modern dance.  It is directed by a wonderful ex-pat named Vera Stasny whom after a Fulbright stayed in Lima. My company came down each trip to tour all over Peru.  We have wonderful friends from Arequipa to Cuzco.  I felt so strongly about the incredible artist there that we assisted in sponsoring the first tour of the National Ballet to the Kennedy Center and have hosted many Peruvian dance artists to DC since.  I believe that the best American dance programs are reciprocal.  Friendships should be maintained for years to come and so I am very proud of the company's continued relations with the Peruvian community of dance.  The fundamental component of arts diplomacy is to create lasting friendship through which we can better understand a global perspective.  I can honestly say that I am still inspired by Peru and our repertory work Chino Latino about  Asian Latino immigration relationships is still one of my favorite works.  It demystifies how Asian and Latin cultures have historically worked together and is set to historic music scores from all over Latin and South America that reference Asian communities living in Latin counties.  No wonder my nickname as a child was "Chino"!

-- Dana

Meeting Artists Abroad

I decided to write about past international experiences and the impact of meeting artists abroad has had on my work and the way I view dance. This is my first installment. In 1999 I was invited to Pakistan to interact with dance artists and travel to the historic sites of Alexander the Great because I was working on a new dance for the Kennedy Center about Alexander's life. The current salt flats of Pakistan are the farthest reaches of Alexander's campaigns. The great artwork of Gandhara, now in the regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, are where the first images of the Buddha emerged. Prior to this time he was depicted by symbols, such as footprints or hands but never in full body form. The artisans left behind by Alexander depicted a Greek pantheon of gods at home and thus gave the Buddha physical form in Pakistan. These Buddhas are beautiful, cloaked in Greecian garb with Amerasian features. As a child I was so fascinated by them that when I reached the great Buddhist temple ruins of Pakistan I was overwhelmed.

In 1999 these sites were under attack from militant Muslims. The art was considered a threat. I remember visiting a chained up museum of Buddhist art that had been recently looted by the Taliban. In the dark, using a flashlight to look at the works that had survived with a security team in tow, these ancient works unfolded before me. Pakistan's people are so diverse being at the cross roads of the East and West for centuries. Faces in the Swat Valley are informed by multiple Semetic tribes, the Chinese, Europeans and more.

I visited 6 dance artists in Pakistan. I choose not to name them to protect them. At the time under strict Muslim law, dancing was illegal but not always enforced as so. Dancers survived under the radar. I met with dancers, watched their choreography, exchanged ideas on art and even thoughts on the effects of the Partician on Katak which is a often thought of as a Hindu based form. My final artist exchange occurred near the tribal areas with a talented Katak dancer. In her home was a man recovering from a gun shot wound. He had been shot for dancing. He had almost died. He appeared to be in his early twenties and was very thin and weak. We sat together and I was so moved by the fact that they danced with the full fear of being killed for practicing their art. They believed so wholeheartedly in dance that it was tantamount to their own physical safety. I will never forget these wonderful dancers. It has stayed with me for years. Now when I hear a dancer question their belief in their work, their funding, their lack of accolades, and a plethora of other woes, these are the dancers that come to mind. How lucky we are to be able to dance freely and express ourselves openly. We have the freedom to build dances with a sheer sense of openness and to communicate our thoughts and ideas through dance to others. May we all find a place to dance with freedom and remember what a gift freedom of expression is and strive to help our fellow artists.

--Dana

The Role of the Shaman

I have often been amazed by the role of the Shaman in all societies, their ability to see into anther world, enter it and return. I often talk to the dancers about this, the idea that if we believe in the world of the dance around us on stage and project it perfectly, then the audience will also be entranced by the journey and come along with us. It is a challenge which I so appreciate all of our dancers taking on. It is the intangible past a leg kick, past a leap which for me is most important. I just love our company and how wholeheartedly thoughtful they are. We have such a unique balance of perspectives from all over the world. It is this diversity that allows us to make up our own globally shared dance vocabulary for each show.




-Dana

A fun 20th Anniversary Event - Please join us!

Please join us February 6, 2012 5:30-7:30 for a fabulous evening of wine tasting and small bites at Bistrot Lepic in Washington, DC and help us support Dana Tai Soon Burgess & Co's 20th Anniversary Season. Details

A Lesson of Light

In our 20th Anniversary Season,  I want to send a heartfelt thank you out to all our dancers from the past who dedicated their time and dancing to the company as well as the many designers who have inspired me.  I was thinking today about the first time I understood stage light.  I was sitting with Jennifer Tipton and she said light is an entity with you on stage and if you project consciousness to an area of stage the audience will feel this.  This simple statement was so profound for me and guides me to this day when thinking about work as I create and coach it.  Her wise words continue to inform me as I collaborate with Laura McDonald from NASA and Sara Brown from MIT on visual projection environments that create worlds for the dancers to reside in.

Our 20th Anniversary in the Year of the Dragon

As we enter the year of the Dragon, I am reflecting on the last 20 years. As you know DTSB&Co celebrates a major milestone, not just for the company but also for the fields of dance, education and cultural equity. The company emerged out of a youth program in 1990. I was asked by the DC Mayor's Office to create a program that would support Asian American high school youth because the District had no arts programs for this community. It was a wonderful journey of learning, teaching and creating work. Fond memories include working with a Beijing Opera group and escalating from a small run down studio in the middle of the city to having the program enveloped for 3 years at the Kennedy Center. As the interest and need snowballed so did the talented dancers who came through the program as well as the new dancers who were attracted to the idea of an Asian American company. I launched Moving Forward:Contemporary Asian American Dance Co in 1992. This became our non-profit that eventually housed DTSB&Co, a branding name change a few years later. It was a very important moment for DC which had up until this point often looked at diversity as a black and white issue. The Latino community was given more visibility when the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood rioted and partially burned. Moving beyond the Asian American model minority myth has not been simple. The fact that Asian Americans, especially new American still struggle with language, social services representation and much more is often put to the side. I hope our work through dance has brought this issue to light.

The works that stand out for me over the last 2 decades that illuminate personal and historic displacement issues include: Tracings a recount of my own family's new American experiences in the Korean Hawaiian community of Oahu in the early 1900's, Island, the story of Chinese Immigrants trapped on Angel Island in midst of the Chinese Exclusionary Acts of the late 1800's, Hyphen which explores the reality of the hyphenated American identity with visuals by Nam June Paik, Charlie Chan and the Mystery of Love, an autobiographic story about growing up as a Korean American in a Latino community and most recently Becoming American, the story of one of our dancers Katia Chupashko who is a Korean adoptee. My goal has always been to create works that are poetic, allow for empathy and understanding while presenting a strong message about inclusion. I am often asked how have you survived and continued to grow as an artist when the field of dance seems to be moving toward commercialism, pyrotechnics and a failing hierarchical management? I always respond by saying

"nurture your own unique aesthetic, don't follow the norm but follow your heart and never forget that one of the greatest goals of art is to build bridges of universal understanding. This path is not easy or simple but it is rewarding and heartfelt. If your art cannot transcend cultural boundaries then go back to the drawing board until someone in DC or Lima, NYC or Chennai, Beijing or Quito can understand the emotional core of your art."

My goal is to have each audience member feel that images in my work resonate with them personally and move them to be more empathetic to the larger human concepts of journey and the physical and emotional struggle to find a place to belong.
--Dana

DTSB&Co Youth Outreach music video!

This music video is the culminating project of our fall Asian American Youth Program which occurred over 14 weeks. The participants explored the concept of self-expression and identity.  They wrote, sang and appear in the video. We are so proud of the students. We begin our next program in mid-January, stand by for more details and their future projects.

DTSB&Co Youth Outreach Program music video from dtsbcodance on Vimeo.

DTSB&Co 20th Anniversary kickoff party featured in Modern Luxury DC

Check out the photos!

DTSB&Co receives grant from the Cherry Blossom Giving Circle

DTSB&Co are proud to have received a grant from the Cherry Blossom Giving Circle awarded to support local API community outreach programs.  Dana attended a recent celebration event at Current Sushi to accept the award.

The Cherry Blossom Giving Circle is a volunteer collective of individuals committed to creating positive social change in the Asian and Pacific Islander (API) communities of the Washington Metropolitan Area.

November 9, 2011: Give to the Max Day DC

Give to the Max Day is a one-day fundraising event on November 9, 2011 that will unite local Washington, DC area communities to support nonprofits serving the region.

DTSB&Co is participating!

Make a donation to DTSB&Co on November 9. You can donate from $10 to sky's-the-limit!

We so appreciate your support!

Dana Tai Soon Burgess featured in the Korean Beacon

Dana is listed as a famous and influential local in Korean Beacon's spotlight on Washington, DC
Check it out!

Dana Tai Soon Burgess recieves 2011 Faculty Choice Award

Congratulations, Dana! Dana received the George Washington University's 2011 Faculty Choice Award. The award acknowledges his leadership within the Department of Theatre and Dance as well as his dedication to student advising.

DTSB&Co In Concert Series: Hyphen

"Hyphen" looks at the experience of being a hyphenated
American—Asian-Americans but also other ethnic Americans and multi-racial Americans, The set design includes short black-and-white “Fluxus films” by famed Korean video artist Nam June Paik.

Hyphen premiered in October 2008.

Another performance review

DTSB&Co's performance this past weekend at Dance Place was reviewed by dance critic George Jackson of danceviewtimes.
Read the review

Washington Post review of "Becoming American"

"In the hands of a lesser choreographer, this piece could be a maudlin mess, the modern dance equivalent of an after-school special. But Burgess, a professor at George Washington University, is pretty much the best dancemaker around, and what he’s made here is a beautiful allegory about alienation and acceptance." - Rebecca Ritzel,  Washington Post
Read the full review