Southeast Asian Dance Project Summary
For full story and images, click on SE Asian Dance Complete.

Sponsored by YMCA of Metropolitan Minneapolis
1988

The Project

The Southeast Asian Dance Project was a collaboration with a traditional Hmong dance artist and YMCA outreach workers that used dance as a cultural metaphor to address conflicting values among Hmong teenage girls, their families, and clan elders.

Inquiries

• What are effective strategies to help local Hmong teenage girls and their families/community as they struggle with conflicting cultural norms of life in the United States?
  
  
• How can dance be used as a catalyst for more productive conversations around issues that are contentious and emotionally charged?

Challenges

• I was brought into this project after the grant was funded. Although the original grant proposal described my job as choreographing a new modern dance, I believed our limited time together would be more effective if we focused on process, not product.
  
  
• In an era when artists who worked in community were generally held in low esteem by the art world, I struggled to avoid internalizing the discrimination that artists experience who work with community relationships as their primary medium.

What I Learned

• I am now more likely to lead from intention (a conscious awareness of where I want to aim my energy) and to let the form of my actions evolve from that clarity of aim.
  
  
• When one party in a system shifts position, the entire system is thrown off its balance. This moment of disorientation is an opportunity to establish a new dynamic, which is potentially (but not necessarily) healthier than the old balance. How any individual in the system responds to the moment of disorientation can influence the way the system re-balances itself.

Resolution

I resolved to learn more about social service assessment and evaluation procedures.