Dirty Laundry Unfolds
I'm thrilled to share performances of Dirty Laundry, a NEA-funded multimedia dance theater work by Li Chiao-Ping Dance, premieres February 6-8, 2025, at the Margaret H'Doubler Performance Space at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. This project—in collaboration with choreographer Li Chiao-Ping and designer Hong Huo—features dancers Katelyn Altmann, Gelline Guevarra, Piper Morgan Hayes, Elisa Hildner, Kaori Kenmotsu, Cassie Last, Li Chiao-Ping, Mayu Nakaya, and Elisabeth Roskopf.
Dirty Laundry unravels the history of Chinese labor alongside contemporary Asian American experiences. Li's memories of growing up in her family's Chong Wo Laundry in San Francisco—a mix of love and hardship—are explored alongside the erasures and injustices against Asian individuals and communities in the United States.
My music for Dirty Laundry explores the "Oriental riff," a musical motif used to caricature Asian people, despite its possible Jewish folk music or American popular dance origins. The sound world for Dirty Laundry folds together found sounds from this cartoon music with the rhythms of washing, drying, and folding, stories by Asian American dancers, and a recording I made with shakuhachi musician Christopher Yohmei Blasdel over 15 years ago.
Join us as we transform pain into hope, shaking the dirty laundry of generational trauma to reveal truths that bring us together.
Chow, Kat. “How the ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ Melody Came to Represent Asia.” NPR, 28 Aug. 2014, www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/08/28/338622840/how-the-kung-fu-fighting-melody-came-to-represent-asia.
Saffle, Michael. “Eastern Fantasies on Western Stages: Chinese-Themed Operettas and Musical Comedies in Turn-of-the-Last-Century London and New York.” China and the West: Music, Representation, and Reception, edited by Michael Saffle and Hon-Lun Yang, University of Michigan Press, 2017, pp. 87–118. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1qv5n9n.