How to Make a Passive Dance

An Immersive Dance Performance by SanSan Kwan

How do you make a passive dance? In an era marked by increasing political aggression, How to Make a Passive Dance poses a timely question: is there value in being passive? Asian Americans historically have had a fraught relationship with passivity, but might there be reason for us to reconsider qualities like deference or quietude? And how can dance – a medium defined by embodied action – serve paradoxically as a space for exploring inaction? This quintet investigates dance as a practice of listening and attunement. Audiences will be invited into an intimate, immersive experience that encourages receptivity.

Choreography: SanSan Kwan in collaboration with the cast
Dancers: 艾音 “Ài Yīn” Adelski, Kayla Chang (understudy), Rosika Dater-Merton, Lily Gee, Raychel Hatch, Tatianna Steiner
Music: Ben Juodvalkis
Lighting: Ray Oppenheimer
Dramaturgy: Iu-Hui Chua

Dates:
Fri Sept 18, 8PM
Sat Sept 19, 8PM
Sun Sept 20, 3PM

Ticket prices:
Youth/Student/Artist $20
General $40
Arts Patron $60

About the artistic director: SanSan Kwan (she/her) is the Mary Tu Chancellor’s Chair in Dance in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. In the Bay Area, she has collaborated with Lenora Lee Dance for 14 years, and also worked with Chingchi Yu, composer Scott Rubin, and visual artist Jen Liu. In New York, she danced with Chen and Dancers, Maura Nguyen Donohue, and Joanna Mendl Shaw, among others. Her first project as an artistic director was Two Doors (2024), a work responding to anti-Asian violence. SanSan was the 2025 United States of Asian America Festival Featured Artist. She is also a dance scholar. Books: Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration (Oxford, 2021) (winner of a de la Torre Bueno© Award and an Isadora Duncan Dance Award); Kinesthetic City: Dance and Movement in Chinese Urban Spaces (Oxford, 2013) and Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects (University of Texas Press, 2004), co-edited with Kenneth Speirs. Journal articles: Dance Research Journal, TDR, Theatre Survey, Choreographic Practices, Performance Research, and more. 

Presented by Asian Improv aRts
Supported by the Mary Tu Chancellor’s Chair in Dance, Zellerbach Family Foundation, and UC Berkeley Arts Research Center
Fiscally Sponsored by Shawl-Anderson Dance Center

For more information, please contact:

Traci Cottam, Assistant Director, Mannakin Theater & Dance
info@mannakindance.org

Or

Tatianna Steiner, Publicity Manager
tatiannasteiner@gmail.com

Or

SanSan Kwan, organizer
sansankwan@yahoo.com