Dana Tai Soon Burgess
Remembering Chinatown
“Remembering Chinatown” is one of the earliest works produced by Dana Tai Soon Burgess when he moved to Washington, D.C. as a young dancer in 1990. Characterized by high-contrast colored filters and fluid movements, the video captures the vibrancy of Chinatown’s community and architecture. Since then, Burgess has become an internationally-acclaimed figure whose portrait is on display at National Portrait Gallery. In this chapter, Burgess reflects on the environment and era that inspired the video which remains as a powerful time capsule for himself and the neighborhood he called home.
In the early 1990’s my dance company, Dana Tai Soon Burgess Dance Co. was just getting started. Our dancers were all Asian American from varying backgrounds – Chinese American, Korean American, Japanese American, Vietnamese American, and AmerAsian. We wanted to dance together, to claim a place to call our own in D.C., to build community as young people. We often danced on the sidewalks and in vacant lots in Chinatown. We would dance all year long, even in the winter when it snowed. We did several video projects that documented our search for community in D.C. “Remembering Chinatown” was one of our videos.
We were already deeply connected to D.C. and Chinatown by this time. We hung out there on the weekends; ate dim sum together, went to the MLK Library and checked out dance books and books about our histories, looked at art at the National Portrait Gallery, wandered the streets and studied old buildings like the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. We loved window shopping in the old Chinese mercantile shop near H and the Chinatown Friendship Archway and looking at the Peking ducks and other food items hanging in windows. At that time there was still an active Chinese community that lived there. Chinatown was vibrant, authentic, and uniquely ours. But we could feel change coming, gentrification was on the horizon.
What resonates with me almost 32 years later is the spirit of our young Asian American sense of resilience; our quest to claim a place and community to call home through the medium of modern dance. In watching the video today, I think about how our dancers were drawn together by the need to share our diverse cultural stories. By sharing through art, by being present, we built a community of Asian Pacific American advocates.
North American 9-Man Chinese Invitational Volleyball Tournament, Washington, D.C., about 1989.
Throughout D.C. Chinatown’s history, artists, organizers, and community members like Dana Tai Soon Burgess have enlivened the neighborhood by claiming the streets as sites to exhibit their passions. This photo from Sightlines features athletes playing 9-Man, a sport that hosts tournaments in Chinatowns throughout North America to this day.
