Asian American(s) Dance in Chicago: an essay and roundtable by Irene Hsiao
Image provided courtesy of Irene Hsiao and the artists of the roundtable listed in order of appearance, top to bottom/left to right: Irene Hsiao, Laksha Dantran, Mitsu Salmon, M Wu, Helen Lee
From the Writer: “Asian American(s) Dance in Chicago” was originally written in 2022 for the forthcoming volume Dancing on the Third Coast. Due to differences in perspective, it will not appear there. This excerpt for PRJ contains three of the four parts of my original essay—the full text is available here. Part I is an introduction on the recent position of Asian Americans within the landscape of Chicago dance and some background on the Asian American movement. Part II, available on my website, is a set of case studies on experimental dances created by M Wu and Hugh Sato, Mitsu Salmon, and Helen Lee between 2018 and 2021 that explicitly name and explore Asian American identity. Part III is the transcript of a roundtable of self-identified Asian American dancemakers convened over Zoom in September 2021. Part IV is a chronological index of local dance writing from 2016 to the present that includes Asian American dancers and choreographers to exhibit sample of the range of dance continually in a process of growth beyond what any individual can witness (this section was updated for this publication in October 2025). I wrote the essay in these parts to illustrate the way that cultural identities may be imposed, defined, chosen, questioned, and surpass definition. To me, there is no such thing as “Asian American dance”—and yet we exist, and yet we dance.
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Introduction
In 2019, Sustain Arts, See Chicago Dance, Candid, and Fractured Atlas released a report titled Mapping the Dance Landscape in Chicagoland. Modeled after a 2002 Dance USA census of Chicago’s dance organizations, the study aggregated data from over a dozen sources to record growth, track trends, and reveal gaps in the dance sector. “Compared with other artist occupations, dancers and choreographers in Chicago were more racially and ethnically diverse,” says the report. “However,” it continues, “notably, Asian and American Indian dancers and choreographers were not represented in the report—although we know that they are active in the Chicago dance community.” Although the content of the report does not contain data on Asian American members of the dance community, the cover image includes a photograph of Angela Tam, founder and artistic director of Yin He Dance, back deeply arched, fingers extended to the sky, in a Dai peacock dance.
In 2021, the Chicago Dance History Project, which “investigates, documents, and presents the individual and institutional past of Chicago dance,” presented an interview marathon, described by CDHP director Jenai Cutcher as “a microcosm of what the CDHP is overall.” “CDHP is for, by, and about everybody,” she said in the same interview. “We’re trying to be as inclusive and egalitarian as possible.” The seven-hour program, consisting of 46 interviewees with representatives of “Chicago” dance as far-flung as Germany and Spain, did not contain any interviewees of Asian descent.
The original subject proposed by the editors for this chapter was “concert dance by Asian-American choreographers in the city… you could focus on one point of intersection, such as the A-Squared Performing Arts Festival from 2016 to 2018”—an annual festival of Asian American artists curated by Hope Kim, Cary Shoda, and Giau Minh Truong at Links Hall that included music, performance art, puppetry, sound art, spoken word, and theatre, in addition to dance—“or you could take a longer historical view and include the career of Sona Osato [sic], a Japanese-American dancer who trained in Chicago during the 1930s.”
Although I hope Sono Osato is mentioned in the chapter on ballet, lest she be omitted, this is my paragraph about her: Born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1919 to a Japanese photographer father and a white mother, Osato moved to Chicago with her family in 1925. She joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at the age of 14 as the youngest dancer in the company, the first American, and the first dancer of Japanese descent. Though encouraged by the company to change her name to sound more “Russian,” Osato refused. In 1940, she joined American Ballet Theatre. A year later, at the same time that her father was interned as an enemy alien and her brother enlisted in the All-Japanese Regimental Combat Team, Osato performed under her mother’s maiden name, Fitzpatrick, but was nevertheless barred from tours due to racism. Even so, during the war, Osato starred on Broadway as a principal dancer in One Touch of Venus, a role for which she won a 1943 Donaldson Award, and as the original Ivy Smith in On the Town in 1944, a production noted for its groundbreaking racial diversity. In 2016, Thodos Dance Chicago created an evening-length biographical work called Sono’s Journey, performed at the Auditorium Theater with no dancers of Asian descent in the cast; Sono was played in yellowface by white dancers. This piece happened to be the subject of the first dance review I published in Chicago. In an interview with WFMT the same year, Osato said, “People need to accept us as people, not because we’re of a particular race. It’s difficult for any racial minority in this country. There’s so much prejudice, and that’s not what we’re supposed to stand for.”
When contacted for interview for this chapter, one potential subject declined to be included, stating she “doesn’t feel comfortable for her dance work/what she has done as a choreographer, dancer & improviser to be written within or specifically defined/categorized by race.” Although I suggested that she might risk being overlooked if she refused, I also agreed with her: why should concert dance by Asian Americans be segregated from concert dance proper? It might make sense if the dances themselves were somehow “Asian American”—and if Asian American dancers and dancemakers are also represented in other chapters on other genres of dance.
But who or what is “Asian American”? The designation has been continually redefined since it was first used in May 1968 by activists Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka to name the Asian American Political Alliance, the first pan-Asian American political organization, in Berkeley, California. They chose the term to cultivate political solidarity among Americans of Asian descent and to oppose the term “Oriental,” a term laden with racist and colonial stereotypes, containing within it notions of being alien, foreign, feared, fetishized, feminized, elevated, cheapened, dismissed, discarded, overlooked, excluded, presumed wealthy, bought for less, exploited, silenced, never enough, hypervisible, invisible—above all, other. From the beginning, the organization intended to organize Asian Americans in coalition with other activist groups, notably participating in the Third World Liberation Front strikes, which united Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latinx groups to fight for the establishment of the first college of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University.
“There were so many Asians out there in the political demonstrations but we had no effectiveness. Everyone was lost in the larger rally. We figured that if we rallied behind our own banner, behind an Asian American banner, we would have an effect on the larger public. We could extend the influence beyond ourselves, to other Asian Americans,” said Ichioka.
“The peace movement was led by whites, and then I tried to join the Black Panther Party in Oakland, and they told me you can’t because you’re not black. So they said you should form your own group, and I thought, ‘Well, what is my group?’” said AAPA cofounder Vicci Wong, recalling their first meeting. “I went in Oriental and left Asian-American.”
“By choosing Third World solidarity over model minority complicity—not only during the strikes, but also in support of the United Farm Workers, Native occupations at Alcatraz and Wounded Knee, the Free Huey campaign, and other concurrent issues—Asian Americans rejected ‘the passive Oriental stereotype’ in favor of ‘a new Asian… who will recognize and fight injustices,’” writes Nina Wallace in “Yellow Power: The Origins of Asian America.”
In other words, “Asian American” was from its roots an activist and political designation, created in defiance of “orientals” as submissive foreigners, walled off from full participation in American society by laws that barred their immigration (the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, de facto in place until 1965), incarcerated people based on race (Japanese internment, 1942-1946), and prohibited voting based on race (citizens of Asian descent only gained the right to vote in 1952, with the McCarran-Walter Act). Yet the Asian American movement began with a view to its ending: “We regard AAPA as a means to an end, and a beginning toward the end itself; that end is a better society where people can live as people,” they stated in 1968.
Yet to “live as people” cannot mean to become white. Cathy Park Hong writes in Minor Feelings, “When I hear the phrase, ‘Asians are next in line to be white,’ I replace the word ‘white’ with ‘disappear.’ Asians are next in line to disappear. We are reputed to be so accomplished, and so law-abiding, we will disappear into this country’s amnesiac fog. We will not be the power but become absorbed by power, not share the power of whites but be stooges to a white ideology that exploited our ancestors. This country insists that our racial identity is beside the point, that it has nothing to do with being bullied, or passed over for promotion, or cut off every time we talk.”
When initially coined, Asian American was an umbrella term for a group that included Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipinx ancestry. Over half a century later, the description is far more expansive and inclusive. “In the United States Census, Asian American is a racial category comprised of at least thirty different ethnic groups and potentially many more cultural groups,” wrote researchers on race-related psychological stress on Asian American students in 2010, referring to the 2002 Census. The same study suggests the following list of “Asian cultural values and beliefs”: “collectivism, conformity to norms, deference to authority, emotional self-control, family recognition through achievement, filial piety, humility, hierarchical relationships, and avoidance of shame.”
While noting that Asian Americans comprise about 7% of the US population and Chinese, Indian, Filipinx, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese origin groups make up 85% of the US population of Asians, a 2021 Pew Research analysis of 2019 Census data remarks, “The largest Asian origin groups in the U.S. differ significantly by income, education and other characteristics. These differences highlight the wide diversity of the nation’s Asian population and provide a counterpoint to the ‘model minority’ myth and the description of the population as monolithic.” In Illinois, most Asian Americans are of Indian ancestry (31%), followed by Filipinx and Chinese (19% each). In the city of Chicago, which contains 80% of the Asian population of the state and contains the fifth largest Asian population in the nation, Asian Americans are about 7% of the total population, though representation in politics and arts remains well below that figure—a 2021 Politico article noted that while AAPIs are the fastest growing minority group, they are also the least represented in politics, at less than 1% of elected officials—representation in Chicago dance has been almost entirely unaccounted for, as the SCD report indicates.
Roundtable
On September 2, 2021, several Chicago dancemakers who self-identified as Asian American met on a Zoom call. We introduced ourselves by the forms of dance we had studied and the reasons we identified as Asian American.
Irene Hsiao: I have a varied dance background. The first form of dance I studied was Chinese folk dance, which I took for an hour a week as an elective in weekly Chinese school. Since then I have studied many of forms of dance—ballet, modern, tango—but have not mastered any. I think I am Asian American in the sense of being second generation. My parents are immigrants who came here as adults. I think they still think of their home, even though they’ve lived here for decades now, as being elsewhere. I feel like I’ve grown up between cultures.
M Wu: I have a pretty varied dance background, as well. Mostly modern, improvisational forms. I started using the term “Asian American” more recently, mostly to express solidarity with a particular movement that started in the 60s and 70s. I think it’s problematic but useful in some situations for getting people in the room and to organize around.
Helen Lee: My background in dance was dancing like Michael Jackson, Madonna, Janet Jackson when I was a little girl. I took a ballet, jazz, and tap class at a park district, but really it was just tap class in our pajamas, I don’t remember exactly. In high school, I started training in hula and Polynesian dances, and I went to Hawaii for my undergrad; that’s where I started more rigorous training in modern, ballet, butoh, and theater. I like moving, and I don’t know if that falls under an umbrella. My dad immigrated here in the mid-70s. I don’t even have a Korean name. My cousins had Korean and American names, but my sister and I did not, because my dad was of the thinking, ‘You were born in America, so you are American.’ I wondered for a long time, ‘What does that mean? What does American mean?’ When I was in China, everybody started speaking to me in Chinese because I look like them. When I explained, ‘No, no, I’m not Chinese, I’m American!’ they’re like, ‘Yeah, but you don’t look American.’ That was the first time I was like, ‘What does looking American mean?’ People outside America, I suppose they think being American means being white. Asian American was a term I felt comforted by, because I was born here, but my family and ancestors are from Korea. It gave me a label to identify with. There some problems with it as well, but it connects me to other Asian Americans.
Laksha Dantran: I’m a trans woman. I came to the United States in 2017, so I would say I’m a new immigrant. If you are saying Asian American, I would like to add one more word: trans Asian American. Because I would like to identify myself as trans, too. My dance is bharatanatyam, an Indian classical dance, used in India in olden days a daily ritual in the temple, so you would also say temple dance. Over time, we say a classical dance form. Bha means expression, ra means melody, ta means rhythm, and natyam means dance—so a dance which uses expression, melody, and rhythm equally. I have been practicing for 37 years.
The United States is very culturally diverse. It’s better to say Asian American than Indian American, I would say, much more comfortable. Identity is very important in this country. We should have something in common.
Mitsu Salmon: My dad is a musician and dancer, so he started teaching me Martha Graham technique when I was a child. During my undergrad in New York, I started doing contemporary, body/mind centering, release, viewpoints. Then I started getting into Butoh in New York, Germany, and Japan. Since then, I have incorporated those trainings in my dance form. My mom was originally from Tokyo, and she was told not to speak Japanese. She had to lose a lot of the language and try to distance herself from that culture to fit in here. I grew up with that, so I didn’t identify as a child as Asian or Asian American. It felt like something that was put upon me, because of my name, Mitsu, or because of how I looked. People would assume certain things about me. I didn’t know how to identify myself. It wasn’t until I went to Japan and studied Butoh and learned the language that I began to feel more Japanese in understanding what parts of me related to being Asian and what parts of me were not and felt American. So it felt like I had to leave the US to own that identity more. I identify as Asian American, and that’s fluid in terms of what that means.
What kind of work do you make? Is it Asian American, and what does that mean to you?
Helen Lee: When I first started making work, I wasn’t thinking about Asian American identity. I was exploring a lot of things about the senses—like the sense of smell in live performance. Asking audience to close their eyes while we guide them. Seeing ladybugs in the air, maybe one would land on them. Then I got into grad school. As I was digging for a bit of video footage of me trying to sing to my grandma in Korea, that opened up exploring my ancestry and my mother’s relationship to being American. My mom has been in America for 45 years, and she doesn’t really speak English. She doesn’t have a single friend. She doesn’t have anyone she can go and hang out with. I started to be interested in my mom’s isolation and our language barrier. I speak some Korean, but I don’t speak it well. I can say, ‘I’m hungry,’ ‘I’m tired,’ ‘I’m bothered by this or that.’ But I can’t say things like, ‘Yesterday I saw this flower, and the way the vines were moving…’ I don’t know how to say stuff like that in Korean. That’s when the work started being more about being Korean American specifically. Tracing my childhood when children have said to me, ‘You look funny.’ Or they’ll pull their eyes at me or say ‘ching chong chong.’ All those memories and stories started to come up, and I started putting them into my work.
M Wu: My only relevance to this chapter is the one piece I made that was specifically addressing Asian American identity. Otherwise other work I’ve made really would not fit under this label at all. I feel confused about what exactly is supposed to be encompassed by this grouping. What is Asia? How do we define that? What are the boundaries here? Are you going to put this giant landmass into a chapter? How do you equate that with anything? The one piece I made was autobiographical—there was a call from the Asian American Performing Arts Festival. It was not intentional; it was just something that kind of happened.
Mitsu Salmon: In grad school a lot of my work was about painting and performance, inspired by Gutai, Japanese avant-garde painting. After grad school, to make a living, I became a waitress. Learning my grandfather was a waiter who immigrated from Japan to Hawaii to become a waiter got me into family history. I lived with my grandparents for some time collecting these stories, relating to other things like labor, the environment. My work often starts with autobiography or family. One of those branches is being Asian American, but there are many other branches as well.
Laksha Dantran: I started dancing at age of 10 and now I’m 47. Bharatanatyam is my work, my dance, my theater. I try to avoid religion, gods, and their stories. I would like to concentrate on energy. I’m also a visual artist. What comes into my mind, to visualize, is all based on the LGBT community. A lot of LGBT people are conflicted about whether to live on the planet or not. I want to make people mentally strong, especially the trans community. I want to give the message, you are not alone, we are all here. Even if they can’t accept your sexuality, they have to accept your energy; it is universal. My next project is curating for a global trans arts festival. Is that Asian American work? I don’t know.
Irene Hsiao: Most of us on this call have had pretty eclectic vocabularies to draw from. Like others, at A-Squared, that was when I first thought about what would be an “Asian American” piece. Is it enough to simply look like this and then show up and do whatever my work is? I did not explore identity exactly in my piece in 2018. I made a piece inspired by the work of Tang Chang, an artist that could be identified as a member of the Chinese diaspora, but he also could be identified as Thai. His work was reminiscent of calligraphy but didn’t contain any writing in it. So there was a subtle linguistic element to it, but I don’t think that was self-evident in the piece I made. If you had asked me, ‘Is your work Asian?’—I don’t think anyone in Asia would think it is Asian. Does it have a cultural identity at all? I’m not sure I would have even considered it. Maybe we’re making Asian American work sometimes—if we’re consciously thinking about how our work is reflecting upon Asian American identity, which is a fluid and confusing thing, but simply because we are Asian Americans making work, that work is not necessarily Asian American.
Helen Lee: When I came back from Hawaii in 2003, 2004, I didn’t get a lot of opportunities. I was just hustling around. But when things like Asian American festivals came around, it got me excited, because maybe I have an opportunity. Is it just because we look this way, does this identify the work as Asian American? That’s not necessarily the case; it’s not like white American work is being called that. I don’t have any answer. I just think representation matters. And when I see other people who look like me making work, I get excited about that. When I was growing up and saw nobody who looked like me, that was pretty disheartening, because it was like, oh, that means I’m never going to be in a position to make that kind of work or have this kind of opportunity. Maybe the labels don’t feel super snug and comfortable, but in dance in Chicago, there haven’t been a lot of Asian Americans. Maybe having a chapter doesn’t feel that great, seeing that there’s this label on it, what does that mean—maybe that needs to happen right now to make the changes moving forward.
M Wu: Representation is important, but the kind of representation that needs to happen is that people of color are well-represented in all of it, not that we have a token chapter so we can check off the box, like, ‘oh, we hit the Asians, thus our book is complete.’ If there was a chapter that was specifically about people making work about Asian American identity, political identity, history, immigration experiences, exclusion, and the things that really come to identify a lot of Asian Americans’ experiences in this country, that’s awesome. But a bigger issue is that there needs to be way more representation in dance history and its telling of what Chicago dance is about. White is unmarked and default, and if you’re a person of color, a woman, anything other, you’re marked and you can’t just do a contemporary dance piece where people are talking about the forms and the lines. By making the chapter Asian American, that marks us in some sense. But would we even be included in this book if there weren’t this chapter?
Irene Hsiao: I have a lot of anxiety: what will I not find? Who will I leave out? And if I fail to do it, will I have failed an entire community? Will I have failed “our” history? That’s why I really wanted to consciously frame this as the beginning of a conversation we’re starting to have among each other. In this conversation, some of what’s coming out is, Yes, we’re Asian American! Yes, we make work! Some of that work is Asian American! But it is also other things. And I just haven’t seen people looking like me doing these things. That’s how I think of being Asian in America—we’re quite accustomed to not seeing ourselves. It’s normal for me to go into a room and be the only Asian, but also, unless something triggers that consciousness, I might not realize it. In a situation like A-Squared, to be watching other Asian Americans making work, presented for an audience that is mostly Asian American, it was a feeling I didn’t know I could have or that I needed.
Helen Lee: Once I got to Hawaii, I was blown away by how many Asian Americans there were. That was something I was not used to, because I grew up here in Chicago, and I didn’t have an Asian community. I always looked different from others and tried to hide myself. Once I got to Hawaii I started to feel more comfortable with myself and my skin. I was able to find my voice, my feet, my standing, so coming back to Chicago, I felt more secure in myself. Growing up, when you don’t look like anybody else, it’s going to always be with you. I appreciate even having this conversation, this dialogue. Where it goes, nobody knows.
Irene Hsiao: I hope we can continue talking together. Knowing that others are out there feels important. I appreciate you very much.
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Irene Hsiao is a dancer, writer, and multidisciplinary artist. She creates performances in conversation with visual art in museums, galleries, and public spaces, a practice that includes site-specific interaction with visual artworks and experimental engagement with artists, institutions, and the public. She is a 2025 Radicle Studio Artist at the Hyde Park Art Center, inaugural Artist in Residence at the Smart Museum of Art in 2020 and 2021, 2022-23 Fellow at High Concept Labs, first Artist in Residence at 21c Museum Hotel in 2022-2023, the first Resident Artist at the Heritage Museum of Asian Art in 2024, and a 2020 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist. Her performances have been presented at Chicago Architecture Biennial, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Smart Museum, EXPO Chicago, Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago Textile Week, Ragdale Foundation, Krannert Art Museum, Alma Art Gallery, Kavi Gupta Gallery, and more.
