Review: DANA TAI SOON BURGESS DANCE COMPANY at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Contemporary dance choreographer and company founder Dana Tai Soon Burgess produced the dance concert “An Asian American Dance Journey” for a three-day run at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. While it is the company’s 32nd year in production, it was their first year collaborating with and dancing in the Woolly Mammoth. 

The program was a cohesive trio of pieces that moved through the Asian American experience of leaving home, arriving in America, and assimilating into the culture. The pieces showcased the physical, emotional, and spiritual changes that Asian American identity undergoes in a clear and poetic style that allowed the audience to understand and empathize even if they couldn’t relate. 

Following the performance was a Q&A with the choreographer, where the audience gained some insight and context into the pieces and his creative process.

The program began with Leaving Pusan, which depicted the turmoil of Soon Burgess’s great-grandmother leaving Korea to work on the Del Monte fruit plantations. The stage alighted with a black and white film of a beach, a ship, and an actual wedding picture of Soon Burgess’s great grandparents, and were a strengthening context without being overt. When the portrait faded out, the dancers took their place. Dancer Aleny Serna stared arrestingly into the audience, donned in traditional Korean somu mask and hanbok and carrying a suitcase. Through waving and bending movements that mirrored stooping to pick fruit or collapsing in sorrow, the choreography expertly emphasized the grief and toil of changing yourself to fit in. The other dancers — including the imposing husband figure, Trevor Frantz — closed in on Serna at times, as if all were pressuring her to assimilate, and they urged her to remove the mask and hanbok and put them in her suitcase. The most poignant moment was when Serna removes everything from the suitcase and convulses in a sob while the others watch, literally and metaphorically unpacking the burden she’s been carrying around with her. It is a moment of great pity, and even the other dancers release their pressure on her, feeling the grief she held from leaving her old life behind. The piece leaves you with the weight of that sacrifice.

Becoming American detailed the adoption story of Katia Norri, one of the company’s former dancers. Norri was adopted from Korea by an American couple as a young child, so the piece explores the pressure of assimilation on children. Again, the piece began with a portrait, assumedly Norri’s adoption photo, that illuminated a dancer dressed in all black — an allusion to the parent who had to send their child into adoption. Though covered, the dancer was excellent at carrying emotion in her performance: She was hunched and sorrowful, and watched on with a bowed, regretful countenance. Other shrouded dancers manipulated the stage settings and directed the scenes, styled after Japanese kabuki. Suitcases are utilized once more, and the prop of a ceramic bowl was prevalent, both representing the child’s birth culture that she still carried with her. Wong skillfully captured the confusion and clumsiness of a child trying to adapt to the world around her. She writhed on the ground in fitful nightmares and trotted curiously and nervously around the stage as her adoptive parents, Trevor Frantz and Felipe Oyarzun Moltedo, watched on and tried to guide her. The parent characters were acted with complexity: With the way they would grasp the child’s limbs or vie for her attention, even though they were gentle and loving, there was still a roughness because of the cultural barrier they were starting with. The piece gives space to her journey to find her own identity when the parents allowed Wong to literally bring her culture (in the form of the ceramic bowl) to the table.

Hyphen was a more conceptual piece than the first two, detailing the turbulence of Asian Americans understanding their identity and where they fit — or don’t — in the American cultural landscape. The surrealist self-portraits of Nam June Paik, disembodied echoes, and intermittent heartbeats were the background for the dancers. The audio was discordant and overstimulating at times, effectively representative of an identity crisis. Dancers filed in and out of the wings in sets, manipulating props ranging from a TV and camcorder to baskets and bowls. The flow of the dancers continually drew one’s eye across the stage: Dancers who were still for several counts were suddenly twirling or pushing their hands into the ground, their movements a balance of rigidity and liquidity that built continuously on each other. Dancers would cover and reveal their faces, a symbol for the identity found in someone’s facial features as a determining factor of their belonging. Hyphen ends with a close-up shot of a dancer on the TV, mirroring the media of Paik, with a stillness and confidence that asserts her existence as real and solid. 

The Dana Tai Soon Burgess Dance Company is a platform for highly artistic contemporary dance, and its repertoire is an outstanding exploration of human identity. Find their next performances at the link below.

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