We recently connected with Grace Tong and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Grace, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I had my start in dance training at an early age, like many folks in the professional dance world. I was probably about 3 or 4 in my first creative movement class, and I then had predominantly classical ballet, modern, and jazz training until age 18. However, if you had asked me at any age, say 10 years old, during my primary training if I was pursuing dance professionally, I would have probably replied with something like: “If I get the opportunity, I will dance forever”. At that time, I was waiting for permission to be a dancer; I had no idea that I could bridge my dance training and my creativity.

I wasn’t an immensely gifted and prodigious dancer when I started… but I have a very big imagination. And I eventuality grew confident in my coordination, creativity, and ability. When I reached college, I discovered many possibilities of choreography and performance, and most importantly how to use these physical tools to experiment and innovate. As I continue to grow into dancing and performance, I learn every day all the ways that I do not have to ask permission to do what I love.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am a Chinese-American choreographer and movement artist from Seattle, WA. Influenced by make-believe games, clowning, paper collage, puppetry, and contemporary dance theater, I ridiculously collage“regular” events onstage to decontextualize bodily and social identity, fairytale, and comedy. In 2021, I graduated summa cum laude from NYU Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Dance and a minor in Gender and Sexuality Studies. I now work as a choreographer, performer, educator, and arts admin.

Dancing is something I have done my entire life, both formally in the studio and informally in my kitchen. The root of my ambition to be a choreographer comes from a desire to create experience for others. I love to design worlds with my body and compositions to build the unexpected for others. At present I mostly work on stages and in film, although I am always searching for other ways to involve spectators in my work. I create work that emerges from my experiences as an AAPI femme in the U.S., but that also continues to move forward with imagination, quirk, and inquisitiveness. I integrate voice, sound, sculpture, costume, and theatricality in my work to create relatable, recognizable, and out-of-place scenery.

Beyond my presentational work, I am also invested in creating sustainable infrastructure to make dancing available to others. With a great sense of play and fun, I often work as an educator and admin to make both performance and the agency of dancing accessible to aspiring students and a wide variety of audiences.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

For me, being an artist is living in a state of joy. I think that the most rewarding (and sometimes the most challenging) aspect of creating and making sense of the world through art, is the act of enjoying myself. Of course, this isn’t the case all of the time, in fact, I spend many days upset by my own performance in the world, or doubting my physical body’s abilities or purpose. However, at my core, I know that every moment can be more thoroughly lived in while dancing. It is so incredibly rewarding to enjoy oneself, and even more so to do it with a community that shares similar feelings. The best part about my job is sharing space with collaborators and spectators, and to share the joy of movement and created experience.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

A lesson I am constantly unlearning is that performance is not necessarily a product, but rather a medium. As with paint, clay, pencil, or Earth, we are constantly moulding and shaping our work until it feels ready to be seen. Performance is the same way. When we perform, we are moulding time and space in the present moment. I love this aspect of the stage, this hinging on the performers knowing and the audience not knowing.

However, I think that with this idea comes an unlearning of perfection, beauty, and an element of commercialized cleanliness. In “dance” as seen in the media, there is a contrived desire for dance to be pure, palatable “emotion”. There is an expectation of crisp, impossible rhythms and movements that create spectacle. I am constantly unlearning these ideas of product as being “beautiful” (the idea of beauty also as being a part of a white, eurocentric performance space) and beyond this, performance as product. In my world, the raw, unkempt moments of performance are when we build the most human of bridges between audience and performer. Which is something that seldom exists in social media or on traditional proscenium stages. I am unlearning the ideas that the value of being an artist is equivalent to the number of things that you can produce, or the number of followers you can reach. For me, being an experimental dance artist means that I have the opportunity to move us beyond the expectations of performance.

Beyond aesthetics is also unlearning sentiment and ideas of “value” instilled in the fine arts world. As a creator who creates from my own perspective as an AAPI femme, I often feature ideas about Asian-American culture and imagery of stereotype. In a recent project, Garden Tongues, I aim to re-appropriate “the Figure of the Asian woman” (a term I learned in my reading of Lisa Lowe’s work, The Intimacy of Four Continents) by re-enacting her image. The performers of Garden Tongues are flippant renditions of Madame Butterfly, impassioned Yoko Ono’s, dutiful mail-order brides, the legends of Mulan, moody Asian sidekicks, nameless pornographic images and more. The performers are also themselves. In Garden Tongues, I aim to examine dimensions (or lack thereof) of “the figure of the Asian woman” alongside the realities of AAPI sisterhood, solidarity, and also conflation of experience. With the conception of Garden Tongues in 2020 and its continued development until the present day, it has been repeated often but has never been the same, because of the U.S.’s ever-evolving conversation about race and inclusion. As its creator and a performer in the work, each time we perform I remind my team that we do this for ourselves, and not for whatever political moment we are existing in. Our true existences are not simply political statements. We have performed Garden Tongues in a number of spaces, with a number of different eyes watching and a number of different reactions.

I have to work hard and often to re-understand my own creations as not merely “identity work”, but rather a work stemming from my own experiences. While all of my work grapples with the Asian-American experience, Garden Tongues specifically describes ocular identities and experiences. A distinction I like to make is that “identity work” is a commodified product (also a term created by hegemonic structures to describe anything that didn’t fit within the norm) while “working with identity” is an on-going process. I am constantly re-examining all of the ways I view “identity work” coupled with the ways that I see the value within my work.

Contact Info:

• Website: gracetong.com
• Instagram: graceytong
• Linkedin: Grace Tong
• Youtube: @graceytong

Image Credits
Alice Chacon Samantha Chapa Anthony Barton t.filmm