Choy cuts across artistic, cultural boundaries

Wednesday, May 20, 2009 -

 Choy in a push-hands demonstration
 

Peggy Choy — dancer, choreographer and teacher — thrives on diversity.

While firmly grounded in her Korean-American roots, Choy actively seeks out and engages in collaborations that cut across artistic and cultural boundaries and create experiences of intercultural synergy.

Her training has included studying ballet, flamenco, modern dance, violin, and Chinese and Korean martial arts. She has apprenticed with Javanese and Korean dance and music masters.

In her performance pieces, she interweaves diverse movement forms — powered by the Asian way of breath, life-force energy or ki — to create dance “landscapes” that tell stories of unsung heroines and heroes and their struggles to overcome great adversities.

Choy, an instructor in UW-Madison’s Dance Program and outreach coordinator for the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, has been named one of the 2009 UW-Madison Outstanding Women of Color.

In the Dance Program, she teaches courses in Asian American movement and Javanese dance. With grants from Virginia Horne Henry Fund for Physical Education and Brittingham Fund, she has developed a new course, “Women and Performance in Cross-Cultural Perspective:  Asian and Southeast Asian Performance,” to be introduced this summer.

“Teaching has become central to my creative work, and to my perspective on life as a whole,” she says.

She points to one of her major works, “Passage of Oracles,” in which she uses a variety of movement forms — Korean- and African-inspired dance, Chinese and Brazilian martial arts forms — to tell the stories of Asian and African passages to this country under difficult conditions. 

In a workshop for teachers on “Passage of Oracles,” she taught about the diverse influences and stories embedded within the work. “A middle-school residency,” she says, “made it possible for me to involve teachers and students in the process of creating a culture of understanding of diversity through bodily experience that is in my mind absolutely necessary in this century.”    

She choreographed the dance drama, “Arjuna Wiwaha” (Arjuna’s Wedding) for the spring 2008 Javanese Dance and Gamelan concert, which involved collaborating with David Furumoto, professor of Theatre and Drama and an expert in Japanese Kabuki theater.  The concert involved her dance students and Andy Sutton’s gamelan students.

With sponsorship by a variety of campus programs and organizations, including the Office of the Vice-Chancellor of Administration, Choy also has worked to bring exceptional artists here to teach and perform.

Most recently, she produced “The Asian Narrative and Revolutionary Martial Arts in Performance Forum,” a three-day series in March that featured playwright Ruth Margraff of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and martial artist José Figueroa of Dark Raven Productions. The events included a documentary showing on Black and Latino martial artists, lectures and demonstrations on the Chinese narrative, the relationship with martial arts, and a Chen tai chi workshop.

In fall 2008, she directed the Arts Institute interdisciplinary residency of Chinese-American composer/baritone saxophonist and activist Fred Ho.

The residency culminated with an evening concert, “Revolutionary Earth Music: People and the Planet Before Profit!” The program featured the premiere of “Tribunal,” with music by Ho and choreography by Choy, with performances by students in Choy’s Asian American movement class and Ho’s Afro Asian Music Ensemble from New York.

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In 2006-07, she produced, directed and performed in the Women of the Scarred Earth Performance and Outreach Project, which received major funding from the Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment and other sources.

That project involved creating dance and spoken-word performances by faculty, staff and students that deal with women’s survival strategies in a world scarred by war and environmental damage. The activities included a tour around Wisconsin and represented the experiences of Asian Pacific American, African American, Caucasian, Latin American and Native American cultures.

Throughout her activities, Choy values and encourages hard work and high standards of excellence.

In her teaching, for instance, she says, “I have found that if a student exerts effort to rise towards one’s greater potential, then the level of the student’s creativity also rises.”

By getting students to work harder, she says, “I have seen not only an increase in creativity and effort at the individual student level, but also an increased synergy among students.  The level of effort and creativity of the class has a whole has been elevated as well.”

-- by Kerry G. Hill

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