Burgess Company Dances ‘Seeds of Toil’ on Feb. 8


“When I was a child,” recalls D.C.-based choreographer Dana Tai Soon Burgess, “I asked my mother about the scars on her hands and she answered simply, ‘I picked pineapples as a child and carried 50-pound bags out of the field.’”

This explains, in part, why the topic explored in “Seeds of Toil: Three Asian American Stories of Resistance and Resilience” is “enormously personal” to Burgess, whose family immigrated to Hawaii in 1903 on the steamship Gaelic. The 50-minute dance piece will be performed at 4 p.m. this Saturday, Feb. 8, in McEvoy Auditorium at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 8th and G Streets NW.

“My ancestors were among the first Koreans to arrive to plantations of Hawaii, where they were indentured workers on the sugar and pineapple plantations of the Del Monte corporation,” Burgess relates. “For three generations, my family would work the fields.”

“The Pineapple Plantation” is the first section of “Seeds of Toil,” set to music by Philip Glass and Claude Debussy. Reviewing the work’s premiere last April in the Kennedy Center Family Theater, Emily Berger described the dancers “moving in, out of and across the floor like waves rushing into shore.”

The other two sections of “Seeds of Toil” are keyed to episodes in American history that had an equally powerful, if more indirect, impact on Burgess.

“Prisoner #44257” portrays the World War II internment of a Japanese family from an agricultural community in California. Burgess learned of Executive Order 9066 — which resulted in the imprisonment of some 120,000 persons of Japanese descent, roughly two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens — “when I was told that my childhood neighborhood in Santa Fe, New Mexico, was in actuality built over a leveled Japanese American internment camp.” One of the inspirations for Burgess’s choreography was modern dance pioneer Michio Ito, who was interned, then deported to Japan.

The third section of “Seeds of Toil,” “Coalición,” depicts the collaboration of Filipino and Latino organizers and migrant farmworkers in California during the 1960s. In Berger’s description: “While the [central] couple danced together in the foreground, the farmers rhythmically moved produce boxes across the stage in a mesmerizing pattern.”

Burgess has been using dance to tell what he calls “the hyphenated story” of people caught between two worlds for a long time. Growing up in a largely Mexican American and Native American community, he was a competitive martial artist before discovering dance at age 16, going on to study the art form at the University of New Mexico.

He launched the Dana Tai Soon Burgess Dance Company in 1992, when he was a graduate student at George Washington University. After directing Georgetown University’s dance program, he joined the GW faculty.

The company has toured to more than 30 countries as a U.S. State Department cultural envoy. Burgess served as the Smithsonian’s first choreographer-in-residence, at the National Portrait Gallery, from 2016 to 2023.

Accompanied by resident pianist Dana Scott, the entire company will dance in “Seeds of Toil.” The production, with a set and props by Kelly Southall, features costumes by Sigrid Johannesdöttir and video by Felipe Oyarzun Moltedo. Following the performance, Burgess will answer audience questions from the stage.

The work’s Feb. 8 performance at SAAM is presented by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in conjunction with the exhibition “Sightlines: Chinatown and Beyond,” on view through Nov. 30.

Also part of the upcoming Sightlines Saturday — special programming on the second Saturday of every month — are a guided tour of the “Sightlines” exhibition at noon and, from 1 to 3 p.m., a hands-on activity in which participants explore local murals and create their own love letters to their communities (meet in SAAM’s G Street lobby). Free tickets for the tour, the activity and the performance can be reserved on Eventbrite via the SAAM website: americanart.si.edu.

Established in 1997, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center “strives to ensure the representation and inclusion of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in the Smithsonian’s collections, research, exhibitions and programs.”

 

 

 

 

 

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