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Returning to the Bay

  • Writer: Jason Vu
    Jason Vu
  • Jun 21
  • 16 min read

Updated: Jun 21

A thorough update of life since leaving grad school, including a brief period in NYC and my return to the Fremont, CA after a decade of living away.


Post-MFA and UArts (Spring & Summer 2024)


After receiving my MFA from UArts, I was Artist in Residence at the school for a year. This is an esteemed position to be part of the teaching faculty and to be paid to make a piece with the undergraduate students. Going into my 3rd year of teaching at UArts, I was beginning to feel more like a good teacher, that I could connect with students deeply as myself. More and more layers of "what I should do" as a pedagog fell away. I just became a fuck-ton more honest about my feelings, what I was interested in, and what I actually felt like teaching. The piece I made with the UArts students was beautiful; you can check it out on my website titled "Through Noise, Log #2"


But I had this bubbling desire to move somewhere else, to make home somewhere else. This choreographer I assisted in grad school, Netta Yerushalmy, asked me to rehearse and perform with her company in NYC. I like her work. I say yes and I take that as a sign to move to NYC. Within the first week of rehearsal I have an apartment set up, rooming with Shane Larson, who is a long-time dancer on the Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane company.


It was Shane's “brat” summer, which was a completely different vibe from mine. I, on the other hand, was post-heartbreak in a new city. It was crazy and loud and mostly I was not okay. My sense of home at UArts had fallen away and I didn't have my ex-lover to retreat to.


I danced in Netta's work at the American Dance Festival. It was my first time performing in a ‘concert’ dance setting and I did so wonderfully!


After I finished dancing with Netta I was UNEMPLOYED for 3 months. I was using my dad's money to pay rent and feeling overwhelmed by the cut-throat demand of high rent-->high labor.


I did try to make up for the intensity of NYC by taking the train into Manhattan to take dance class and see shows... but after seeing a few shows, I was left pretty uninspired. I don't think it was because the quality of the work was bad. I just didn't feel any spark of inspiration from them; and I know that spark--that's what got me dancing at 13 and kept me going up until now.


A friend of mine, Anh, told me it might take 5 years to find my footing in the city. Set on proving to myself I could do it, I swung a serving job at a sushi restaurant in Manhattan...


and I hated it.


I can't believe people stand up for that long and act cordially to strangers. I quit after 10 days, with a deep reverence for all restaurant staff. A lot of Asian and Hispanic immigrants worked the back and getting to know them during my employment confronted me with some things I still didn't understand about class difference.


Something in my ego shattered after quitting my serving job, and I think because of the class issues I was confronted with at the restaurant, I started to feel it would actually be wise to not use my dad's money to pay for an NYC apartment. I wanted a cleaner relationship with my dad's support, one where I had conscious control over where money was flowing and that it wasn't unnecessarily going to the wrong places.


I told my parents I would move back in with them in November, just after 5 months in the city. I told my new NYC friends that I was leaving. They were sad but understanding. And I told my Philly friends, with whom I shared more heartbreak.


I let go a lot of furniture, packed 5 XL boxes to ship cross-country, then flew back to Fremont, a place I hadn't lived in for a decade. 


me and Aisha in Chinatown Icecream Factory, NYC
me and Aisha in Chinatown Icecream Factory, NYC
with UArts students post Netta's show at ADF, they were so proud of me and told me how much of my class they saw in my dancing
with UArts students post Netta's show at ADF, they were so proud of me and told me how much of my class they saw in my dancing
me and Jon after seeing The Wiz on Broadway, I'm still listening to that soundtrack
me and Jon after seeing The Wiz on Broadway, I'm still listening to that soundtrack

Teaching at USF


I was fortunate enough to land a teaching job at USF, thanks to Megan Nicely, one of the co-chairs of the dance department. I had emailed her (like I did many folks in the Bay Area Universities) "Hey I'm Jason / this is what I do / want to meet and help me find my way around here?". Megan and I connected quickly. There was a sense of similar values and sensibilities around dance, so when it just so happened that there were some openings (which is super rare) she offered me all of them. I was to teach a full semester of advanced contemporary, advanced hip-hop, and make a piece with the undergraduate students.


I started in January, 2 months after moving to the Fremont. I went in as I do most things, kind of haphazardly scrambling a plan that kind of helps and then improvising the hell out of it because life in real-time is a shit-storm of unpredictabilities. Often I have thoughts like "my god I have no idea what I'm doing. What even is the structure of this class? Am I even teaching something I care about? Jeez these students must think I'm crazy. They look bored and confused!!!” 


I’m used to that talk though. I had been doing it the last 3 years at UArts and I still saw my students prosper. I knew to let go of the worry.


One of the things I had to (and continue to) create for myself is a lane for my practice as a Vietnamese person. The course titles "contemporary" and "hip-hop" aren't exactly how I'd like to describe my classes because they come with some expectations about form/style that aren't really what I'm up to. Often I had students come in with an idea of what the class was going to be and then be surprised at that discrepancy. Most students found their way in to my class material. It took a lot of vulnerable sharing, like me sitting down and saying "Look, I'm not really a hip-hop dancer. I didn't even grow up in that world, in battles or cyphers, but I do have a relationship with hip-hop because of my teachers. So what you're getting in this class is what I've understood and distilled through my own experience." It was an important lesson for them, that teachers carry lineages through their own life. Maybe, as opposed to there being a singular homogenous thing that everyone knows or doesn’t.


What I'm reminded of this semester is that students respond to generous vulnerability. Now I say "generous" because there can be a vulnerability that is manipulative -- often used to suppress people's actions. I think what I'm trying to get at here is a vulnerability that is an invitation to understand me and my process. I found out that it’s okay to say “I’m trying something new and I don’t know exactly how it’s going to go, but it feels really important to me. Can I share it with you and can we talk about how it lands?” 


I do have one regret this semester in my teaching. I had a few students who were not experienced enough to keep up with the material but I allowed them to continue with the class. It was because of a few things: 1) I was told enrollment is important for the program (and my paycheck). 2) I also had thought that my classes could be “all-levels”, which really isn't true. The material I teach isn’t easy, and it wasn’t fair to those newer students to be so overwhelmed. I continued to teach at the advanced level, as most students were capable and thats what I was hired to teach. But I saw how those beginner students struggled and by the time I knew it wouldn’t work, it was too late to tell them to enroll in something else.


The piece I made with USF “keep the rain” was a lovely process. I think in my newness to SF and the reduced expectation about who I was as a maker, I got to lean into ridiculous and spontaneous ideas. I’m often hyper-planning and pre-choreographing. This was different. I was playing. I shared memes with the cast and included them in the piece. I showed up more as myself and I was able to make some creative choices that affirmed a world I wanted to see. 


I owe it to the cast. I made it clear from the beginning that our 3 hour weekly rehearsals were to generate love into the world (as opposed to reproducing cultures around scarcity, unworthiness, and time urgency). My students were receptive and there was very little BS about needing to "prove" themselves as good dancers. We were all there to figure something out and enjoy doing it together.


The students wrote a super loving card, each saying in their own way how they felt seen, experienced a lot of fun/joy/play, and began to understood dance as being part of the world.


I totally did my job as a teacher.


I’m set to teach again this Fall semester.


me and my students after their performance
me and my students after their performance

Feldenkrais and Non-Doing


I am on my third year studying the Feldenkrais Method at the Institute in Ann Arbor, Michigan. For those unfamiliar, Feldenkrais is practice that uses very subtle movements of the body to improve our habitual embodied patterns. 


The thing I love about Feldenkrais, and what completely radicalized my relationship to my body, is the way that it forefronts the power in doing less and listening more. Sometimes in Feldenkrais, we don't even move--we just imagien the movements and experience the excitation of our neuromuscular pathways. There’s something in this doing less and approximating non-doing that has helped me realize how neuro-plastic we really are, and that we can, in fact, change.


In Feldenkrais pedagogy, our potential to change is contingent on our ability to reduce the friction of striving. My teacher, Ohad Nachmani, once said to me “Sometimes it’s not enough to reduce the effort, sometimes you also have to reduce the motivation.” It's counter-intuitive... that there are times that in order to grow into a better version ourselves, that we need to let go of the temptation to force it into happening.


It's when I've stopped striving that I notice how often I act in accord to “I’m not good enough”. When I focus on doing less, I see how even the intention that arises before my actions are motivated by my desire to fix myself. Driven by “I’m not good enough”, I take on the shape that got me this far — contracted, shoulders in, head and eyes turned downwards, tongue tied and pulled down to close my throat, slightly twisted to the right with my hip, right rib cage slightly collapsed.


Attending to these patterns has helped me have so much more hope about it all and just bringing these patterns into consciousness has given me soft opportunity to adjust. As I find my head on top of my spine and my eyes on the horizon, I have much more confidence in what I want.


Can you picture it too? Somebody standing effortlessly tall -- that's someone who puts love into the world.


Is anatomy a kind of poetry?


I'm tired of saying this because of how over-inflated this idea is now, but I do think if I had a talent, that it would have something to do with sensing my body. I don't know how much others sense (and I can't), but I know that when I cognize and compare why I act the way I do, it seems I might follow my body a little more than others.


Since I was young, I found this weird safety and assurance in studying Anatomy. One of my favorite bulk purchases of the year was three books by one author, Blandine Calais-Germain — “Anatomy of Movement”, “Anatomy of Breathing”, and “Anatomy of Voice”.


What I find fascinating is that we have all these physical, proprioceptive, emotional, and even energetic sensations that interact with our own personal maps of anatomy. It's not that anatomy (or science) has answers for it all, but what I find useful about anatomy is that it gives us language to try to locate and describe our sensations.


I think it’s awesome that two people can hear the word “shoulder” and for that to conjure two distinctly different sense-ideas. Or that we can palpate the cervical spine on two persons and for that to have two vastly different sense-responses, shaped by all things — culture, movement history, emotional attachments, etc.


So while studying my bones, muscles, fascia, and organs is concrete in a way, I’m moreso invested in the open ended, poetic experiences of “skull” or “femur” or “larynx”.


When I went to Brown University, one thing I felt deep shame about was that I didn't like reading. Many of my friends, the Ethnic Studies, Literary Arts, and Performance Studies majors, seemed so comfortable with poetic and cultural theory. All the meanwhile, I was a Human Biology major. I was good at biology in high-school and up until my sophomore year in college, I wanted to be a doctor.


I think now I’m finally understanding how my Human Biology degree from Brown actually means something, as opposed to thinking it was just some useless blip in my journey towards being an artist. I do actually know words and I am a poet. I always have been. It just so happens to be that I write poetry with somatic language. My students at USF remark at how my live-description of somatics helps them find new parts of themselves and I like to think that what I do to transform viscera isn't so different than what James Baldwin or Ocean Vuong do.


I’m satisfied with the way somatics is home to me. I'm glad part of me likes the order, the cause & effect, the convincingly tangible quality of Biology. I have this massive body of knowledge, both in theory and in practice, of what bodies do, how they do, sometimes even why they do what they do. It’s just information I know how to organize into my sensoria.


I don’t think that makes me necessarily more embodied than someone else. I don’t think you need to know anatomy to be able to locate or recognize sensations. This is just a way that I do it and it’s a way I’ll probably continue to keep offering ideas in this lifetime.


It's funny how when we accept the younger parts of ourselves that there's more room to grow into other things, because now I've been getting more into non-science literature. Right now it's Ocean Vuong's "The Emperor of Gladness". I'm also studying song-writers and writing some verses myself... and they aren't songs about the pelvis, even if that could be kind of cool.


Dad, receiving a short Feldenkrais lesson on breathing to release back pain
Dad, receiving a short Feldenkrais lesson on breathing to release back pain

How do we know what’s next..? Other teaching updates


It’s Friday, June 20th. I still live with my parents, but I want to move out soon. There’s only so much time I can spend with my parents as a 30 year old, already in the throes of figuring out how I’d like to shape my career. I know this of myself, that the more time I spend with them, the more likely I am to get confused and misguided about my artistic practice, that my need for financial safety trumps my need to create. Both I need, of course, but it can feel like there's no room for art when I'm around them. I don’t blame them; they’re immigrant refugees. The pursuit of an artistic life is the responsibility of the next generation, I think. 


I’m trying to teach dance more, both for the means of more income and because I envision myself making even more impact as a teacher. I teach at In The Groove, arguably the most popular street-style and commercial dance studio in Oakland. I teach a beginner dance class there, which has become a kind of pedagogical constant for me. Those students, most of them hobbyist adults, have the least amount of movement coordination I’ve ever worked with. It’s been a great deal of slowing down, realizing there’s even simpler variations I can make, and enjoying offering dance in a non-professional culture. It’s rich. I’m tasked to wonder how to get people to love dance when I can’t “wow” them with inventive phrase material, when I can’t rely on the fact that the students have devoted their life to dance. How do I lead a class to people who might want to experience the transformative aliveness of dancing when there’s very little training, very little shared language in the room. I’ve had to reorient myself less to the “what” in the dance class (because that varies with the level of dancers) and more to the “how”, which I’m beginning to see can be pretty consistent between successful dance classes, beginner or advanced.


Since moving back, I’ve also worked privately with a few pre-teen and teen competition dance students, who come to me because they reportedly “have more fun” dancing with me than with their teams. We do private lessons where they hope to have more fun but they also still want to, across the board, improve their “technique”. Usually this just means they want to be able to do more pirouettes, jump higher, and kick their legs higher. Which, having come from competition dance myself, I can actually relate to quite deeply. Mostly my task is to invite them deeper into their sensing bodies. The goal is deceivingly simple — learn to breathe in a relaxed and consistent fashion while you dance, don’t hurt yourself when your dancing, and try to dance in a way that feels good .. But when their goals are the lofty aspiring artist kind, it actually takes a complex understanding of what the heck a body has to do to express the demanding ‘techniques’ dance asks of you. I like seeing that I have and I am developing this complex understanding, in an almost empathic-algorithmic (or intuitive) kind of way. Feldenkrais is 100% helping, and so is my 20 years of studying movement (I'm dating to my beginnings in Tae-Kwon-Do.)


It’d be nice to adjunct at another University in the area. I like the varied students I have, but I miss having students that are capable of taking on anything I throw at them. That’s one thing I miss about UArts. I really don’t know if the bay has that kind of calaber of dance students.



Studying Voice, Studying Vietnam


There’s one more huge development in my life, which is my daily voice, singing, and music research, a portal that’s opened up to me in the last 3 years. But that’s such a beast to take on in the moment. I can’t get myself to write too much about it now because it’s raw and has challenged my artistic identity in ways that I often don’t know how to make sense of. The event of a voice coming from a body is a world in itself, separate and concurrent with the movement of a body. The coordinations of it all, the larynx, skeleton, muscles of the torso to support to the breath, the eyes, the lips, the pelvic floor… the list goes on. We might think the voice is just this one thing that we have, but it’s as changeable as the ego. It’s as fluid (thankfully) as the person we believe ourselves to be, which actually is never quite the same thing. And music? I think music is just an attempt to create conditions that emphasize the beauty of the voice—at least lyrical music. Studying my voice, noticing how it takes shape, and listening intently to others, has given me another portal to look into conscious action and the (non/)habitaul ways we embody ourselves socially. I have no idea where vocal research is going to take me. It just feels like an old friend I’ve been making amends with, one that I’m going at great lengths to take care of tenderly.


My grandfather on my dad’s side loved music, and wrote songs on his guitar until his last days. My dad’s side of the family is actually extremely musical. My grandfather had formed a band of my aunts/uncles, excluding my dad—who would have rather spend his time with computers and tech. Three of my aunts are stellar singers, one of my uncles is a producer/composer, and another one is a sound engineer. Most of them tried to do music professionally in their first 20 years of living in the states, but growing-age and capitalism eventually forced them out of it. 


I feel more connected with my family when I think about the voice, singing, and music.


I don't think it's a coincidence that I also chose to enroll in Vietnamese classes this year. I never studied it formally and had only ever been fluent before I started kindergarten in public school, when I was primarily raised by my parents and grandparents. I realized that a lot of my dissociative habits in my early years actually came from ignoring my parents when they spoke Vietnamese to each other, and now, in my efforts of learning, I’ve become way more present with them at home. Turns out they weren’t as absent as I blamed them for, but that there was just a language barrier between their history and my budding American childhood. Beginning to recognize and understand my parents means that I’m actually able to understand their personality more. I get to hear how they talk to each other as partners, which is a completely different personality than the Viet-English voice they speak to me with. And I get to re-experience the voice I had as a toddler.


This conscious pivot towards to Vietnamese culture, although it seems like an obvious choice to make from the outside, has been something I’ve had a lot of friction with. So much of my education, at all levels, from pre-K to grad school, has valued the perspectives of people that weren’t my own. I studied all kinds of dancing and music, never really my own—so much so that I began to identify as this in-between person. Someone who was able to connect seemingly disparate cultures, navigating the space between white and Black dance artists. So I thought the value of my work was being able to amend and make sense of difference. It’s really only the past few years, and especially now, that I see that perspective as mis-guided and more importantly, that I actually do have a thing that feels like “home”. I do have hundreds of years of cultural references and present-day contemporaries that I don’t have to pretend to connect with. Before this, I often had to reach cognitively for something else, someone else — I wanted someone else to affirm me that I belonged somewhere, even if I myself didn’t feel at home in the artistic research in my colleagues.


Last weekend I went to a show that my friend, Johnny Nguyen, curated — “Home is Now(Here)”. 3 Vietnamese artists presented separate works — 2 mixed-media poets and 1 dance artist, my friend Johnny. It was in little Saigon, in the Tenderloin of SF. Johnny managed to advertise the event so well that even Viet elders came, the kind that only spoke Vietnamese and talked/took pictures at totally inappropriate times during the performance. It was amazing and life-changing to see people who looked like my family, having access to the voice of contemporary Viet-American artist. There was even live head-set accessible translations. I just didn’t know it was all possible to feel the pertinence and urgency of contemporary art… I honestly really didn’t fully believe it until I saw it at this show.


You’ll see that on my website I’ve changed the language of my practice away from “someone who understands and connects disparate forms” to “someone who is concerned with creating a choreographic voice with Vietnamese and queer aesthetics”. I do think being Vietnamese in America inherently means that I’m in-between many dominating cultures, as most minority people are, but I am so much more capable and confident now that I have a place in my heart I can call home.


with my niece Kinsley (L) and Harper (R), making songs from words of Harper's choosing
with my niece Kinsley (L) and Harper (R), making songs from words of Harper's choosing
the elders in the dining room, Christmas time 2024
the elders in the dining room, Christmas time 2024
I took charge of yakitori for father's day !
I took charge of yakitori for father's day !
and I'm a HUGE fan of the WNBA -- I cry every game seeing women be so badass, me with my eldest sister Quyen
and I'm a HUGE fan of the WNBA -- I cry every game seeing women be so badass, me with my eldest sister Quyen


That’s it for now. Thanks so much for reading.


Love,

Jason

 
 
 

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