Wendy Morris .org - community art stories, resources, and creative inquiry

The Project

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

During the annual Minnesota Hmong New Year celebration, some teenage girls inserted jazz dance moves into traditional Hmong dances. Clan elders, who were concerned that the girls were becoming too Americanized, considered marrying the girls off. Adolescent Hmong girls whose behavior was outside culturally acceptable norms were in a risky position. "If a girl was seen leaving the high school with a boy, she might find herself married at fourteen with children at fifteen." (YMCA Detached Worker) This traditional solution was illegal in Minnesota because the girls were underage.

The Hmong youth perceived themselves as trapped between two options: abide by the roles and boundaries enforced by traditional elders, or leave the community including extended family relationships. The Southeast Asian Support Group, which existed to help recent immigrants with the transition to life in the United States, designed a strategy to address the problem. Since the cultural conflict had manifested in the arena of dance, they decided to address the issue through dance as well.

For over six weeks, girls attended classes in modern dance and traditional Hmong dance, as well as performances of jazz and modern dance. When the girls were asked to compare contemporary American dance and traditional Hmong dance, their initial response was, "Everything is different!" But through dialogue, the girls developed a chart contrasting the dance styles (click here to see their chart). This chart became a vehicle to discuss fundamental differences between modern American and traditional Hmong cultures.

The girls immediately recognized how the dichotomies on their dance chart were a mirror of their everyday lives. For example, under the modern dance side of the chart the girls wrote: "sudden changes in energy; uses lots of space; men and women dance together, as well as women with women and men with men." The girls talked about how in the school lunchroom their energy levels ranged high to low, they gestured a lot, they used their whole bodies and talked with boys; whereas, at dinnertime when they were home with their families, the girls’ energy levels were more subdued, their movement range was smaller and they spent time with women and other girls.

Exploring these differences through the metaphor of dance was a relatively non-threatening way to surface conflicting cultural habits and values between the girls and the elders, as well as within the hearts and minds of the girls themselves. Through the movement classes and dialogues, the girls began to claim their biculturalism as a resource.

In a performance for families and the community, the girls demonstrated their ability to preserve their traditional heritage while living as contemporary American teenagers. In the modern dance open class the girls, dressed in t-shirts and shorts, transformed slow, elegant Hmong dance movements by speeding up the movements or whipping across the room with full-bodied abandon. Afterward, the girls immediately performed the same classical Hmong movements in the traditional manner, dressed in traditional clothing. The performance was an embodied message that the girls had the capability and willingness to both sustain traditional forms and also explore new ways of being.

A critical element of the presentation was an unveiling of the dance chart and a discussion of the girls’ insights into their emerging bicultural heritage. Dance provided a language to open up a conversation that had previously been blocked by an intensity of emotion on both sides.

In the end, the families were proud of their girls, especially because there were few other culturally appropriate ways to showcase the strengths of Hmong youth at that time. As participants in this project, the girls contributed to the collective thinking around complex social issues -- not just amongst themselves and their families, but also in the larger community systems.

Project team:
This project was planned from an ongoing dialogue with participants from the Southeast Asian Support Group, YMCA outreach workers, and community members. The support group, which included 15 Hmong and Laotian teenage females, was designed to help with the transition of cultures. Project Artists were My Yang and Wendy Morris. YMCA staff for the project were Kher Yang, Kristin Johnson, and Janet Madzey.

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 fact, as often happens in community arts, the process became the product. I intentionally structured the public presentation as an open class and an extension of the dialogue. We used our costume budget to print the dance chart onto red tee shirts. Whenever we wore these shirts in public, strangers and peers asked us about them, and the shirts became an invitation to bring new voices into the conversation.
This project took place at a time in my career when I was actively performing in theaters, museums, and galleries. It was also an era when artists who worked in community were generally held in low esteem by the art world. I could not reconcile the gap between my work in community (which received very little external recognition) and my work in elite art venues (which garnered media attention, grants, and international gigs). I struggled to avoid internalizing the discrimination that artists experience who work with relationships as their primary medium. My confusion was reflected on my résumé, which for many years excluded this project and my other community-based work. For an example of my theatrical performance work from this period, click on Shadow to Frame.

What I Learned

The choice to use an open class format for our public presentation is an example of form following intention. Our intention was to generate a productive dialogue about what it means to be a Hmong girl living in the United States. That aim was better served by a less formal performance than originally planned. In contrast, years earlier in my studio training as an artist, I was taught to let intention follow form; to begin with form and to gradually allow the content to reveal itself, the way a classical sculptor might reveal the figure inside a rectangular block of stone. Through community-based artmaking, I learned how to allow form to emerge out of the raw material of collective intention. The most profound influence of my community art experience on my everyday life is a deeper understanding of the relationship of form to intention. From my early studio training, I still value the way open exploration of form can help to clarify meaning; but on an everyday basis, 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.
Using movement as a metaphoric language, the girls were able to move forward with some core issues, rather than remain stuck in specific situational conflicts. "In hindsight, it would have been intriguing for the families to be involved in a parallel track as the girls" (YMCA Detached Worker). Even though the families and community members did not participate as directly as the girls in the program, the girls still reported a shift in the relational dynamics. 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

How do I evaluate success in community-engaged art? In my theatrical work, as an individual artist collaborating with other artists, I had intrinsic criteria for success. But at the end of a community project, I often wished I had more information about the short-term and long-term impact of our work. I had no idea how to assess an arts-based program with a social agenda, especially an agenda as specific as this one. I resolved to learn more about social service assessment and evaluation procedures.