On October 9, those two forms of storytelling come together at the Oxford Community Center (OCC) when internationally acclaimed and award-winning choreographer Dana Tai Soon Burgess brings The Memoir & The Movement to OCC—an evening that pairs conversation about his life and work.
Members of the Dana Tai Soon Burgess Dance Company (DTSBC) will join him, performing works drawn from some of the same stories Burgess tells in his memoir, “Chino and the Dance of the Butterfly.”
The book title belongs to the nickname Burgess picked up as a boy in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
“I grew up in a Hispanic neighborhood and had a lot of Hispanic friends. And my nickname became Chino, and Chino really means ‘the Chinese man.’ And when I was young, it always frustrated me because I would always explain: ‘I’m Korean American, I’m not Chinese’, but it all got lost in translation, and somehow that nickname stuck, and it is still my nickname to this day.”
The Korean part of his heritage belongs to his mother’s family, descended from the first group of Korean immigrants to come to America. “My ancestors arrived in 1903 on the first steamship, the Gaelic, to arrive from Korea to Hawaii with indentured plantation workers from Korea. So my family worked there for three generations, including my mom, who grew up on the plantations. She didn’t wear shoes until she was in high school, and she and my family experienced a lot of hardship, but they had this amazing resilient spirit.”
His father’s family was of European descent. Both of Burgess’s parents were visual artists, and he grew up in an artists’ community in Santa Fe, where he attended bilingual schools.
Growing up with those different cultural influences allowed Burgess to think about identity in broader terms. “I think that America is so unique in that a large part of our cultural history is hyphenated experiences. Whether you’re African-American, Irish-American, German-American, there’s this hyphen somehow that’s there, whether it’s written or not, it’s assumed.”
After giving up dancing because of a back injury, Burgess founded the DTSBC in Washington, D.C., and later became the Smithsonian’s first choreographer-in-residence at the National Portrait Gallery.
Burgess had grown up watching his parents create work on canvas and with textiles. At the Portrait Gallery, he began with the same sort of creativity about choreography: Who was this person? Who made the portrait? What was happening around them?
One commission led him back to someone he had actually known. Sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi had been a friend of his parents, and Burgess met him several times as a child. “When the National Portrait Gallery came to me and wanted to commission a new work of an artist whose portrait is in the collection, it made sense to choose Isamu because I had that personal connection, and then could work with curators and historians to think about the socio-political context in which he was making work. So it all combines together, and then it becomes movement.”
He also researched the artist to personalize their story. For a dance about abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler, Burgess found that she listened to Debussy and Bach while she worked. He used their music in the piece. “There are these interesting conversations that start to happen with these visual works that start to mold and craft the dances, even the rhythms of the dances.”
This experience gave him the ability to showcase a “living exhibit” of his choreography, But not all of Burgess’s work uses artists as inspiration.
In 1999, his work as a cultural envoy for the U.S. State Department took him to Pakistan, through the Swat Valley and Khyber Pass and into the tribal lands near Afghanistan.
He remembers women moving through the streets almost completely concealed by burqas, except for their eyes. “All you can see is this mesh on their faces, but they’re these complete black shadows that sort of run along the street for moments with children clinging to them, but then dart into doorways.”
That became the piece he calls “Khaibit,” which means “the shadow” in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It will be a work Oxford audiences will see on October 9.
During the same trip, Burgess was working with a local dance teacher when a very thin young man, attached to an IV, entered the room—he had been shot and beaten for dancing publicly. “That has stayed with me as such a visceral image,” Burgess said, “because we’re so lucky to have the freedoms that we do in order to express ourselves in the United States.”
It is these types of images, encounters, and memories that Burgess absorbs and then makes them reappear,, sometimes years later, in his choreography.
His travels have also given Burgess a different view of his role as a cultural ambassador. He has worked for the State Department in countries around the world, but he doesn’t describe those trips as simply introducing American dance.
“I’m not just taking dances to another culture, but I’m learning about that culture and investigating their stories and the way that they have expressed their stories through movement.”
For Burgess, that exchange works because dance needs remarkably little explanation. “I do believe that dance is our universal language because before we had written language, before we even communicated verbally, we were probably dancing around an amazing fire under moonlight, right?”
The Oxford program, The Memoir & The Movement, will combine Burgess’s conversation about his memoir with performances by the DTSBC.
There will also be wine.
RD Winery, a Vietnamese-owned winery in Napa Valley, will provide a tasting during the evening. Burgess found an unexpected connection there, too.
“Because my family was originally an agricultural family on sugar cane and pineapple plantations, it just feels like this whole agricultural component is definitely built into my experience.”
Then there is the less complicated explanation.
“I also think that celebrating with a glass of wine with the Oxford community is also a lovely idea.”
The Memoir & The Movement with Dana Tai Soon Burgess and the Dana Tai Soon Burgess Dance Company will be presented Friday, October 9, at the Oxford Community Center.
For tickets, go to https://oxfordcc.org/product/dana-tai-soon-burgess/