Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration

Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration. SanSan Kwan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021; Pp. 136.


SanSan Kwan’s Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration contributes a timely analysis of Asian American performance to the fields of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, fields in which the voices of Asian American scholars are needed. Love Dances studies in great depth a series of duet collaborations that center intercultural connection, grief, loss, and impossibility. Kwan’s personal experiences of love and loss, her own duet performances, and her reflections on her late husband serve as entry points to her observant and philosophical examinations of intercultural collaborations.

Kwan situates her work among scholarship that questions the ethics and politics of intercultural performances. How do intercultural collaborations, she asks, heal the harmful effects of Orientalism and colonialism; lead to vulnerability and love in the presence of radical differences; and generate powerful connections in the face of losses in translations, refusals, and grief? While dance scholarship has identified the ways Asian aesthetics have been historically appropriated in Euro-American concert dance, Kwan also outlines the history of interculturalism in theatre that emerged from appropriation and exploitation. Kwan turns to theories of “new interculturalism” that better “tease out the complexities across multiculturalism, postcolonialism, ethnic and racial difference, intraculturalism, and interculturalism” (9). She looks to the duets not for what they represent but for what happens in the process of intercultural exchange and centering the emphasis on relationality. She looks at the dance collaborations as a means to discuss the themes of love, loss, vulnerability, refusal, third spaces, and pedagogy, finding that they provide something embodied and intimate that other expressive mediums cannot.

The book features Kwan’s detailed descriptions and thoughtful reflections on a progressive series of intriguing intercultural duet performances. In Chapter 1, “Talking,” Kwan analyzes the performance Pichet Klunchun and Myself between classical Thai choreographer Pichet Klunchun and French choreographer Jérôme Bel. She argues that the performance, despite being an intercultural collaboration, reinforces and reproduces Orientalist logics. She is wary of its mostly verbal exchange, with occasional dance demonstrations, as it retains power dynamics and reveals where intercultural collaboration potentially fails. Reading Klunchun as the East and therefore the keeper of tradition and Bel as the West and therefore representative of individual innovation, Kwan shows the inequities that can arise in an intercultural exchange. However, Kwan notes that this failure also provides a pedagogical opportunity to delve into histories of racialized oppression and colonialism.

In the second chapter, “Mourning,” Kwan analyzes two different duet collaborations: Flash and Simulacrum. In Flash, African American hip hop choreographer Rennie Harris and Japanese American butoh-based interdisciplinary dancer Michael Sakamoto both practice movement forms stemming from histories of racial and social violence and trauma, yet their intercultural textual and movement collaboration provides strategies for healing trauma and creating cross-cultural empathy. Harris resists intimacy initially in the creative process, but Sakamoto’s hospitality and generosity and Harris’s reciprocity transformed the rehearsal space into a space of truth devoted to surviving anti-Black racism and post-incarceration Japanese American life. In Simulacrum, Kwan explores the potential for empathy. In her analysis, she delineates the ways that care and vulnerability emerge in the process of cross-cultural collaboration between Argentinian contemporary and kabuki dancer Daniel Proietto and Japanese Flamenco dancer Kojima Shoji. Both the Flash and Simulacrum duets are predicated on themes of mourning, rendering loss as absence that can also be generative. “Commiseration,” for Kwan, “is a practice of mutual empathy” (62). Through empathy, the artists show that we can have a meaningful connection to another’s cultural-corporeal history, even if we cannot fully inhabit it.

In the final chapter “Loving,” Kwan turns to Vietnamese French choreographer Emmanuelle Huynh who duets with Japanese butoh artist Kasai Akira in Spiel and with Japanese butoh-informed dancer Otake Eiko in Talking Duet. Restating her interest in Leo Cabranes-Grant’s concept of intercultural encounter as an “engine of emergence” and not solely a point of contact and meeting, Kwan looks to these duets as forms of pedagogy. These textual and movement performances create third spaces to encounter alterity and otherness and reveal the incommensurabilities and impossibilities of intercultural encounters. Spiel and Talking Duet expand on the prior chapters’ text and movement analysis by centering improvisational performance. Improvisation, she argues, demands interlocutors to be receptive, responsive, “submissive but also sovereign” in ways that deepen the intercultural collaboration (104). Improvisation becomes the method of vulnerability, openness, and willingness to change.

Kwan concludes this highly original and compelling study by questioning what unites collaborators even when their intercultural encounters fall short. For Kwan, the collaborative process across and between cultures bears potentiality, the practice of empathy, and the act of loving. She grounds the significance of these intercultural encounters as models of how to love, and co-create, even in the face of misunderstandings and loss. Love is a guiding principle and a necessary condition for ethical intercultural exchange, and for Kwan love does not exist without loss. Ultimately love offers opportunities to begin again and again. Love Dances contributes significant insight to Dance, Theatre, and Performance Studies from the poignant perspective of a performer and a scholar. Accessible and nuanced, Love Dances is a necessary text for practitioners looking to collaborate ethically across cultural, racial, social, and gendered spaces.

grace shinhae jun
University of California, San Diego/San Diego City College
The Journal of American Drama and Theatre
Volume 34, Number 2 (Spring 2022)
ISNN 2376-4236
©2022 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center