DDP Talks To Jessica Tong (Rehearsal Director)
A.I.M by Kyle Abraham
DDP: Is there someone you accredit to mentoring you and the roles you’ve had?
Jessica Tong: There have been many incredible superhero women, that I look up to immensely, that had and continue to have tremendous influence on me throughout the different roles of my professional career. Meredith Dincolo, Robyn Mineko Williams, the legendary Claire Bataille – all of which while I was at Hubbard Street – to name a few. These boss women always lead by example and demonstrated to me what strength, in its many forms, could look like.
Ultimately though, I owe a vast majority of my growth to Julie Nakagawa, former Director of the Lou Conte Dance Studio and Hubbard Street 2, and current founding Artistic Director of DanceWorks Chicago. She has been a guiding light to my many phases of life, professional and personal, because how can you separate the two? From my time as a green 21-year old with Hubbard Street 2, through a maturing dancer life, to today as a mother and leader. She has had a great impact on me – how I take class, how I carry myself as a professional, who I am and what possibilities I possess, how to understand my value system. She inspires me to live in accordance with that – a “dance citizen” as she would say.
DDP: Can you speak on your project with Hubbard Street, Unboxed? And what inspired you to create it?
Jessica Tong: Against the backdrop of pause that the covid pandemic brought on, along with the monstrous murder of George Floyd and spotlight on the Black Lives Matter movement, the awareness of racial inequalities and injustices in this country were re-ignited. It sounds silly, but one day in quarantine I was watching Disney’s Fantasia with my then newborn son, Cyrus, who coincidentally was born on March 12, 2020, the day all the theaters were shuttered. I was passively humming along with the movie when the Nutcracker’s dancing mushrooms came out giving me cause for pause. I thought to myself, wow, since Nutcrackers are not happening this year, ballet companies are really lucky to have this suspended time to reassess the all too common Asian stereotypes renditions of this variation. What could it look like to challenge these “adorable and harmless” portrayals of one-dimensional squinty-eyed shuffling Asians? But sometimes you can’t wait for others to do something, you have to do it yourself. So I enlisted the choreographers Peter Chu, Yue Yin, and Edwaard Liang and asked them just that. In conversation with the artists of Hubbard Street, they explored their feelings about the Chinese divertissement and then made their own takes on the dance. It was very special and surprising.
DDP: As you transitioned from being a dancer to being on the director’s side, what was the hardest part of transitioning?
Jessica Tong: I had major imposter’s syndrome. Without a doubt I didn’t necessarily know what I was doing, so in my heightened self conscious state I felt like my former dancing peers didn’t respect me. I took every interaction of conflict or question very personally like I was at fault for it all or could fix it all. I have since gained a lot of perspective and realistically know that I can only be in charge of my own reactions to situations and not of others’.
DDP: Were there any moments in your life that you wished you had a mentor but didn’t have one?
Jessica Tong: I think I always had mentors at-the-ready in my life but unfortunately, I didn’t necessarily seek out their counsel. Perhaps I needed them, but didn’t know I needed them. I believe that is part of the problem. In times of struggle, we traditionally are taught to suck it up, figure it out on our own, let time tell. Letting others in when experiencing vulnerable uncertainty can be scary, it takes courage and reciprocal trust. But to have a sounding board in someone who simply says, “I relate to what you are going through because of xyz,” I think that would ease the journey just a bit.
DDP: How can the dance ecosystem as a whole improve this idea and implementation of mentorship?
Jessica Tong: In the arts world, there is often an idea of, “nobody held my hand when I came up, so let the next generation learn the same way I did.” But why? Because it builds character? I understand that there has maybe been some over-coddling to an extent as of late, trying to protect everyone from some hard truths. Perhaps. But while the hope is that certain ways and behaviors are improving in the dance world, that still doesn’t make the professional career easy. Dance is tough on the body, on the mind, and it requires a mammoth amount of resilience and all hours of dedication.
I think there are a few ways the dance ecosystem can improve mentorship, but the first that comes to mind is to respect honesty. I am not saying be cruel, that is different. Maybe there are fears of retaliation, but if someone is coming to you for advice, it is best to be 100. I also think that in order to be a mentor, you need to see someone through life’s journeys – the ups, downs, and plateaus. In a world that expects immediate results, we must remember we are human. Vast change doesn’t happen overnight, within one snapshot of a creative process, or one single semester, it is a long game.
DDP: Tell me a bit about Unboxed and GSAF, your mentorship programs.
Jessica Tong: Unboxed happily led me to gain thought partners in Phil Chan and Georgina Pazcoguin, co-founders of Final Bow for Yellowface. After the horrors in Atlanta happened and the Stop Asian Hate movement was gaining momentum, there was a clear need to build a larger infrastructure to support our AAPI community in the dance field. I am a founding board member of Gold Standard Arts Foundation (GSAF), and our goal is to be a resource for AAPI creatives working in dance, bringing support for and visibility of one another from the inside out.
Right now at GSAF I am in the midst of building a multi-generational mentorship program for our community. Supporting both early and mid-career artists, this initiative will guide individual artists at different phases of their lives and career and will be at no fee to the mentee, circumventing any cost barriers that can sometimes be a hindrance to fulfillment.
People's Summit, Photo by Midia Ninja