Identity Politics Give Ohio Group Their
Edge
BY CHANNING
JOSEPH
Yella’: An Asian-American Female Dance was performed in Hales Gymnasium
on Monday, to a small but attentive audience. Directed and choreographed
by Tamara Welch, a graduate student from the Ohio State University dance
department, the performance was created in pursuit of Welch’s Masters
degree in the fine arts.
Intended as an artistic exploration of the intricacies of racial and
gender identity, the hour-long modern dance presentation seemed to captivate
the audience with its vision of the day-to-day life of an Asian-American
female. At the end, the audience seemed stunned, evidenced by the fact
that no one rose from their seats for at least half a minute, an indication
that they may have wanted to see more from Welch and the three other
dancers: Danah Bella, Mira Kim and Mei-Chen Lu.
The sound design and arrangement of the production, a collaboration
between k. terumi shorb (OC ’99), Brian Casey and Welch, was a notable
highlight and point of interest. Seemingly inspired by the electronic
textures and voice manipulations increasingly prevalent in some of today’s
popular music, it was a fitting complement to the piece’s choreography.
(photo by Tom Shortliffe)
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At points one heard high-pitched whining
soundscapes supporting the dancers’ movements, and at others one heard
voice-recordings of the dancers and composers, poignantly reciting poetry
like, “I’m a thought in your head with no room to exist/I’m like paper,
like plastic/I’m wrapped ’round your fist.”
The piece was divided into four sections, and each section was titled
poetically to signify some of its intended meaning. The first was called
“Photos are Worth More than Two Dimensions,” and began with the dancers
walking on the stage holding large metal pots and performing various
movements with them, imitating what seemed to be cooking, washing and
other domestic activities, and perhaps evoking the struggle of Asian-American
women against the stereotype of them being good housewives.
The scene transformed as the dancers overturned their pots and stood
on top of them, adopting the postures of people posing for photographs.
Welch said this part of the dance was a reference to photographs as
metaphors for stereotypes, because photographs are two-dimensional and,
like stereotypes, do not represent every aspect of a person.
The other sections of the presentation, respectively titled “Differing
Overlaps Sameness,” “Day In and Day Out” and “Steering Through American
Eye Flow” were, according to Welch, dance interpretations of the everyday
struggles of Asian-American females.
She said that her intention with these consecutive sections was to deal
with the desire of Asian-Americans to be treated equally, to capture
the emotion behind the daily pains of Asian-American females and to
explore the fluidity of identity. “We just want to be treated like everybody
else. That’s something across the board for Asians and other minorities…We
are Americans even though we look Asian…[but] within different contexts,
we identify as different things. We’re steering through what people
see us as, [so] I’ve found that I’ve never wanted to label anything,”
she said.