Biography
I am a Ph.D. student in the joint program in East Asian Languages & Civilizations (EALC) and Theatre & Performance Studies (TAPS). My research centers on performance, indigeneity, and cultural economies in late 20th-century East Asia, attending to the institutions, archives, and lives through which they are remembered or forgotten.
I’m currently focusing on a comparative study of two performance companies active in this period: the Kyoto-based butoh group Byakkosha and the Yunnan Ethnic Culture Institute, a school founded to preserve the song, dance, and oral traditions of Yunnan’s indigenous ethnic communities. Drawing on archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, oral history, and close analysis of performance and writing, I ask how avant-garde and indigenous performance, usually studied as separate domains, moved through the same transnational performance circuits, were shaped by the same post-(Cold) War economies of “capitalized indigeneity,” and shaped individual lives. I am particularly attentive to the tensions among artistic aspirations, charismatic leadership, and economic survival. The project sits at the intersection of performance studies, East Asian area studies (or Global Asian studies), and indigeneity and ethnic studies.
Beyond this project, my interests span dance and movement studies, medical humanities, critical theory, and modernization of East Asian religious praxis. I ask how anatomical modernity disciplines bodily knowledge and how alternative kinesthetic models coexist and circulate – the “subtle bodies” in “New Age Spiritualism.”
I am also pursuing yoga teaching and somatic therapy trainings, as I believe these embodied practices are integral to research in dance and movement studies, performance theory, and the anthropology of the body.