Moderator: Sai Bhatawadekar (Professor, UH Mānoa)

1) Celine Coderey (Research Scholar, UH Manoa, Dep. of Anthropology)

Dancing the Ocean: Navigating toward Cultural Sovereignty and Ecological Awareness in Contemporary Oceania – This paper explores how, across the Pacific, dance festivals and non-instrumental navigation are historically, sensorially, politically, and ecologically intertwined. Rather than separate domains, these practices converge as embodied forms of knowledge that reconnect communities to ancestral worlds, reanimate cultural memory, and articulate ongoing struggles for sovereignty and environmental stewardship.

Their contemporary resurgence is often associated with two landmark moments: the inauguration of the Festival of Pacific Arts and Culture in 1972 and the launch of the voyaging canoe Hōkūleʻa in 1975. Both catalyzed regional movements to recover knowledge systems eroded by colonization, Christian evangelization, and modernization. Yet their relationship is not merely chronological. Dance and voyaging are deeply interwoven: canoes are welcomed through ceremonial performances, and ocean crossings culminate in gatherings where dance is central. Choreographies, chants, and musical forms frequently evoke navigation and ancestral journeys.

I argue that their convergence lies in their shared nature as embodied, sensorial, and place-based practices. Knowledge is transmitted through attunement to winds, swells, stars, and bodily rhythm, fostering reciprocal relationships with land and ocean. These practices also challenge colonial cartographies by reclaiming the ocean as a space of connection – what Epeli Hauʻofa termed a “sea of islands”- contributing to foster a pan-Pacific identity.

Drawing on ethnographic examples from Tahiti, the Marquesas Islands and Hawaii, this paper argues that dance and navigation operate as mutually reinforcing arenas of cultural resurgence and environmental stewardship. By examining the interplay between embodied performance and oceanic voyaging, it highlights how contemporary Oceanian communities are quite literally dancing—and sailing—their way toward cultural sovereignty and ecological awareness.

2) Aparna Nambiar (Assistant Professor, Davidson College)

Creolizing South Asian Dance: Usha Jey, Hybrid Bharatanatyam and performing the invisible, entanglements of South Asian and Afro-Caribbean diasporic dance –  French-Sri Lankan dancer Usha Jey has been making waves in the world of South Asian dance since 2022 by combining hip-hop and Bharatanatyam into her elevated, signature style that she calls ‘Hybrid Bharatanatyam’. Going viral in the dance-saturated social mediascape of the pandemic era (2020–2022), this paper articulates Jey’s dancerly instinct to showcase on YouTube her juxtapositions of the diasporic dances she encounters as a Sri Lankan-Tamil child of war migrants in Paris. On the one hand, Jey wasn’t the first to attempt such a fusion—entangling elite Indian classical dance with Bollywood and hip-hop dances is a girlish, pop-dance activity attempted in urban dance classes and social media reels around the world. On the other, Jey distills these commonplace (Glissant, 2010: 31) cultural experiments into a relational poetics of tropical temple dance entangling with expressions of urban, Afro-Caribbean dance, framing and refining popular dance practice as moments of world-making. In endeavoring “to keep the essence of each dance,” she practices Glissant’s notion of creolization, “allowing each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open… in harmony and errantry” (2010: 34). While this paper uses Glissant’s archipelagic poetics as a concept, the rhizomic routes of dance via new media—through which Jey’s work circulates—offer rich potential for the exploration of Oiticica’s delirium ambulatorium, the elation of errantry of mixed aesthetics and incompatible hybrids in contemporary urban spaces. I expand this notion of ambulation here into the virtual realm. In Hybrid Bharatanatyam, Jey explodes hierarchies of the elite and urban, caste-bound and popular, cultured and unrefined, into a hybridized strand of hip-hop Bharatanatyam that opens the horizon for both practices onto infinite shores—from Paris to the North Atlantic, to Southern India and Sri Lanka and back.

3) Anna Stirr (Associate Professor, UH Mānoa)

How To Document Dance? – Subi Shah (1929-2008) was a Nepali performer and self-taught scholar who aimed to preserve the music and dance traditions of his home in central Nepal. My team and I have been translating his books into English, along with their music and dance notation, audio, and video recordings of performances, for multimedia volumes entitled “Music and Dances of Central Nepal: The Works of Subi Shah.” This presentation engages with one book: Shah’s unpublished manuscript, “Basic Theory of Folk Dance,” in which he attempts to document dance in several ways. He creates his own dance notation for the Pangdure (aka Maruni) dance tradition; describes the dances in detailed narratives; and includes musical scores that incorporate his dance notation. In our research and preparation for filming performances we learned much more than his book told us, about history, spiritual importance, rituals, and performers’ desires for the future. Here I return to Shah’s question: how to document this? I introduce what he did, plus what we did, comparing our motivations and perceived audiences, to identify and interrogate the factors that influence the apparently simple question of how to document heritage dance forms, to retain their valued aspects for future generations.

Diandra Jones (Independent Artist)

Dance as Defiance: Embodying Resistance – This discussion/movement based lecture and workshop aims to explore the power of multicultural dance as a source of joyful resistance against an increasingly divided world. As the great-granddaughter of Irish immigrants who fled famine, oppression and attempted cultural genocide under the 800-year British occupation, my childhood and early adult years as a competitive-turned-professional Irish Step dancer exposed me to the complexities of what it means to be a cultural dancer. From the cultural pride and connection to ancestry, to the challenges of authenticity, modernization, under-representation, misrepresentation and commercialization–these issues, I discovered as a lifelong scholar of multicultural dance forms, are common to cultural dancers worldwide. I hope to share another invaluable lesson I have learned through my life’s work: that although there are many ways to address these issues, one of the most gratifying and unifying means is through the shared, cross-cultural embodiment of these dance forms. In the very act of sharing dance, dancing together, we remember in a visceral way the intrinsic joy of these dance forms, the strength and resilience they inspire in the dancers themselves, the intercultural understanding and unity and continuity they imbue across generations and geography. 

In particular, I hope to share two cultural dance forms that embody this common theme of dance as an act of joy and resistance: Irish Step (my ancestral, and first, dance language), and Caribbean Soca (my adopted dance language). Together, we will trace their shared histories of struggle and defiance through the dances themselves. 

Moderator: Michelle Huynh (Faculty Specialist & Co-Director of APDF, UH Mānoa)

1) Wei-Ying Hsu (Associate Professor, National Chin-Yi University of Technology, Liberal Education Center)

Living Heritage as Embodied Method: Zen Dance Beyond Formalized Conventions in Taiwan – When a dance form once seen as “tradition” loses its aesthetic appeal and public influence, how can its legacy endure? This paper examines Taiwan’s Zen Dance, arguing that living heritage is not the preservation of fixed forms, but the continuation of adaptable, embodied mind–body practices. Postwar Taiwan’s classical dance is an example of what Hobsbawm calls an “invented tradition.” Rather than being directly inherited from the past, it was created by choreographers who drew upon the movement vocabulary and narrative of Chinese opera, reimagining them through modern choreography and ballet techniques. This new dance form emerged under the policies of de-Japanization and re-Sinicization, emphasizing Chinese cultural elements and using opera movements and formal conventions to construct collective identity. Through continuous physical training and stage practice, classical dance gradually became a standardized “tradition.” As political, economic, and aesthetic contexts shifted, Zen Dance emerged as a new direction within the same lineage. Grounded in Zen-inspired thinking and built on movement principles from Chinese opera, it responds to the training system of Chinese classical dance developed in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and incorporates somatic techniques. Chinese opera movement remains recognizable, but it is generated from inner dynamics rather than copied as a template. By emphasizing body-mind awareness, Zen Dance reconnects theatrical dance with a wider Sinitic tradition of self-cultivation through movement. Its resistance is thus not a rejection of tradition, but a refusal of imposed representational frames and standardized taste—recasting tradition as living heritage that can adapt across changing contexts and sites.

2) Lisa Fusillo (Professor, University of Georgia)

Architects of Form and Resistance: Choreographic Innovations by Massine, Goh, and Lin Hwai-min – Across different cultural and historical contexts, choreographers Léonide Massine, Choo San Goh, and Lin Hwai-min each explored their living heritage and “opened doors” for future generations by their practices, choices, and innovations involving abstraction, cultural reference, and architectural design. Though working in distinct traditions and eras, all three challenged rigid conventions and dominant attitudes toward dance within their environments.

Massine inherited a legacy of experimentation through his work with the Ballets Russes. He reimagined ballet’s formal structures and pioneered abstract ballet, particularly through symphonic works that de-centered narrative and emphasized sculptural group formations and spatial design.

Singaporean choreographer Choo San Goh worked primarily in Western contexts where abstraction was already legitimized. Within this space, he challenged Euro-American dominance in ballet choreography, dismantled expectations/stereotypes that Asian choreographers must reference folklore or national identity, and in his choreographic voice asserted abstraction as a universal artistic language.

In Taiwan, Lin Hwai-min expanded abstraction in choreography that embraced spiritual and philosophical inquiry. By blending East Asian movement practices and philosophies with Western modern dance and ballet, his choreography demonstrated how abstraction and architectural design could carry cultural memory and embodied consciousness.

Massine broke barriers of what ballet could be; Goh challenged who could define it; and Lin reimagined which philosophies could shape it. Each encountered resistance and produced works of resistance. This paper examines the lineage linking these artists and examines their contributions through the lens of abstraction, architectural design, and living heritage, focusing on tensions between tradition, innovation, and choreographic legacy.

Moderator: Mareva Minerbi (Lecturer and Discipline Coordinator, Leeward Community College)

Session 1

Tiffany Mills (Director of Dance, Lewis & Clark College)

Murmuration – Our current political climate has divided our nation, causing factioned communities. Countering this trend, I am interested in how to build integration and cohesion. As choreographer of my NYC-based dance company, I choreographed and directed “Murmuration” (2025), an experimental dance film that looks at bird behavior to understand how to build community across multigenerational dancers/non-dancers, including physically diverse and neurodiverse participants with Parkinson’s Disease. 

“Murmuration,” with composition by John Luther Adams, is inspired by the hypnotic flocking patterns of starlings, the only bird species that murmurate in the thousands, creating unique, swooping, cooperative formations to keep warm and protect themselves from prey. The fascinating non-verbal communication between starlings—their distributed leadership and choice-making—was our jumping off point. We asked: How can bird flocking inform humans about non-hierarchical leadership and non-verbal communication? Computer scientist Craig Reynolds has also asked this question. His research on emergent group behavior without a formal leader helped inform us. As choreographer, I worked with dancers to generate movement collectively, blended with contemporary music inspired by the flapping of wings. The diverse performers worked from a collective conscience to establish a group behavior and dynamic, exploring the essence of murmuration. 

“Murmuration” was commissioned and filmed at Artpark, a NY presenting organization. I believe “Murmuration” is an echoing of Hulihia. Bird flocking, with its decentralized control, fluid leadership, and adaptive behavior, can inspire new forms of human organization that move away from rigid structures of leadership and create an emergent unity.

Priyanka Tope (Independent Artist)

PENDULUM – Pendulum is a contemporary dance film rooted in kathak that meditates on history’s cyclical nature—its endless swing between rupture and return. Like a pendulum that never reaches equilibrium, the film questions why societies continue to repeat patterns of violence, erasure, and forgetting, and whether it is possible to interrupt these cycles. Is there hope in sight, or are we bound to oscillate endlessly because we refuse to learn from the past?

Emerging from kathak’s lineage of rhythmic precision, narrative gesture, and codified expression, Pendulum resists inherited form while remaining in conversation with it. Rather than centering traditional hand gestures, facial abhinaya, or strict rhythmic frameworks, the movement prioritizes visceral emotional impulse and embodied response. The resulting physicality is raw and interior—honoring kathak’s expressive core while breaking open its formal boundaries. This resistance is not rejection, but transformation to keep Kathak as a living practice that can respond to the present.

The film draws from the poetry of Mirza Ghalib, a literary inheritance deeply embedded in South Asian cultural memory. The verses are vocally recomposed and sung off-rhythm by Priyanka to heighten emotional texture rather than conform to classical taal (rhythmic pattern). This destabilization mirrors the film’s thematic concern with imbalance and repetition. A commissioned cello score, a Western instrument, interweaves with the vocals, creating an East-West sonic dialogue that reflects Priyanka’s lived experience as a member of the South Asian diaspora in North America.

Situated within Living Heritage: Resisting Form / Forming Resistance, Pendulum frames heritage as embodied, adaptive, and relational. The film inhabits the tension between lineage and innovation, remembering and remaking, proposing that heritage survives not through preservation alone, but through courageous reimagining.

Misa Tupou (Local Artist)

Fala: Living Heritage in a Miscarriage – Fala is an experimental short film that fuses devised movement to reposition the fala mat from its functional role into a performative identity.   

Originally a short play entitled, Cycles, this play emerges from a personal encounter with miscarriage, which delved into the loss of a child from a male perspective. In the creating and restructuring of the play, the fala became a device to explore this loss through body movements wrapped by a fala mat. The mat as body, as birthright, is a symbolic manifestation of Pacific identity and belonging. For example, in a Tongan funeral ceremony the fala mat that you wear is dependent on your rank or how close you are to the deceased; the one that is gone, but who gave you the ultimate gift, life.

Fala, born from an idea to creatively explore miscarriage on a theatre stage. Then transplanting it to the world of street theatre and onwards to the intimacy of an elevator, insisting that heritage does not belong only in traditional performance spaces, but paints a visual reminder of carrying culture through change, honouring lineage, remembering and continuing to move forward. 

Session 2

—In Special Collaboration with ROLLOUT Dance Film Festival Macao—

“Living Heritage, Moving Memories” — Selections for Presentation at the APDF Symposium 2026

The historic centre and the cultural heritage of Macao are both important economic and sociocultural assets of the city. They constitute the ontological foundation of the city’s development. However, beyond the institutionalised narratives and heritage policies, there exists a layer of subtle essences inhabiting these cultural sites and practices. As the city evolves, which memories are perceived by its residents as most precarious, and thus, an impulse for resistance emerges? 

For this symposium, ROLLOUT has chosen five dance films produced by Macao artists between 2013 and now. These works serve as a longitudinal mapping of what Raymond Williams (1977) termed “structures of feeling”—the lived, social experiences of a culture in flux. Through the past decade of Macao’s development, these films articulate the affective shifts occurring at the intersection of body and space. 

Passage is a visual ethnography of the living alleys in the historic city, capturing spaces which were still unmediated by the tourist gaze and defined by local occupancy.  The Moment is like moving snapshots of an iconic cultural association acting as a witness to urban transformation, dancing in soon-to-be-removed sites entangled in preservation controversies. 1629 utilised the filmmaking technology of its time to engage in the revival of a heritage hotel, a site deeply embedded in the city’s collective memory. Set Sailing, Lai Chi Vun returned to the heritage site of the old shipyards to retell the story of a once-thriving shipbuilding industry which shaped Macao’s maritime soul. Rhythm of Sharing treated the body as a living archive, recording the precious, everyday ties between food, home, and community in a local neighbourhood.

The hybridity of “dance film” provides a rigorous methodology for cultural inquiry, reconciling the ephemeral performativity of the body with the permanence of visual documentation. By treating the moving body as a primary research tool, the above film and dance artists transmuted transient somatic experiences into a durable archive of the present.

Through the synthesis of the cinematic lens and the physical self, these films occupy a dual position: they are simultaneously creative interventions and historiographic records of Macao’s urban evolution. In doing so, they carve out “third spaces” which safeguard the idiosyncratic and the fragile against the “oblivion” of grand narratives, ensuring that the city’s subtle emotional textures remain visible within the broader discourse of urban change.

Film Listings

Passage  | Macao | Lorence, Chan Ka Keong, Candy Kuok  | 2013 | 5′

This is a place where has been washed by many people and many stories by years of time.  To the place, the consciousness of an individual is insignificant.  It is that one second, one minute, one day, one month, one year, one century that gives colors of the present.  Besides from time, what we could also see are all those people and things of the past that are absent at this moment. 

Concept: Candy Kuok , Lorence Chan , Raul Saldaña

Choreographer, Dancer: Candy Kuok

Composer, Cellist: Raul Saldaña＠Terrae Ignota Arts Association

Director, Editor: Lorence Chan

Camera Crew: Keo Lou, Benz Vong, Adrian Li

The Moment | Macao | Ao Ieong Weng Fong | 2016 | 9’05

20 years have passed. What has become of our city? What have we become? How have you been, the ones we love?

Never changed, as sincere as before, Comuna De Pedra is presenting the way we are living. We are passing the strength of resistance, at the moment.

Concept, Choreographer: J Lei

Video director, Photographer, Editor: Ao Ieong Weng Fong

Performers: Jenny Ip, Nikita Lei, Sabrina Lou, Candy Kuok, Jojo Lam, José, Josephine Leong, Inês Kuan, Oscar Cheong, Ceci Fong, Jenny Mok, Elayne Ng, Mick Lei, Kin Lai, Ng Lok Lok

Music: Sonia, Lao Ka Ian

1629 | Macao | Erik Kuong, Chloe Lao | 2018 | 08’00

The Fortress of São Tiago da Barra was constructed in 1629. It was one of the most important fortresses in Macao for its strategic value and location, as it guarded the water entrance towards the Inner Harbour. As time goes by, the fortress has been restored and renovated for different roles, such as being a military site, cultural relics, and a hotel. Today, one needs to pass through a time-tunnel like passage to enter Pousada de São Tiago, making it a small planet of its own, one which retains its own sense of history, casting a contrast against the leisure and entertaining environment surrounding it, generating a space for interesting dialogues about exchanges and conflicts.

This work is created for the project “Rolling: São Tiago” as “Work #3”

Concept: Erik Kuong, Chloe Lao

Composer: Njo Kong Kie

Dancers: Sonia Lao, Karen Hoi

Set Sailing・Lai Chi Vun | Macao | Liu Ying Hong | 2020 | 06’31

“Lai Chi Vun” shows a transition in the history of Macao. The abandoned shipyard reveals a sense of helplessness, a void created with the decline of the shipbuilding industry. I passed by one day, and saw an old man making his own little wooden ship silently, a man who still goes to this shipyard everyday.

Concept, Director: Liu Yinghong

Performers: Liu Ying Hong, Hong Chan U, Lao Pui Lon, Wong Lap Cheong, Leong Pou Seng

Special Cast: Tam Kam Chun, Tam Chun Yip

The Rhythm of Sharing | Macao | Four Dimension Spatial | 2024 | 04’11

Food Stall seems like a listener. It has a unique taste that wants to preserve in the place. Being in a city, trying to find the original taste through some clues. The taste will change while the place changes, also the changes because of the flow of people. In Macau, people are constantly reshaping and deforming. “Listening” “hometown” and “city people”, waiting for customers in a food stall with fate, hoping that those who have met will come back again. During this time, the performer collects beneficial/curious things and then shares.

Performer: Man Ian Ku

Videographer: Keng-U Lao

Dramaturg: Ronald Un

Acknowledgment: Weng Kei Chong