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TRaditional Chinese Dance @ UW

Application

Summarize your proposed experiential learning activity, including the primary focus of your activity and whatever tasks or actions it entails.

At the beginning of the fall quarter, I started an RSO called Traditional Chinese Dance @ UW (TCD), with the goal to make Chinese culture and Chinese dance easily accessible to UW students. For my experiential learning activity, I will work with the rest of the leadership of TCD to host a series of workshops through which I will teach short sections of Chinese dance to the public. At each workshop, we will focus on a different category of Chinese dance and connect the movements we are teaching to Chinese culture. Planning a workshop includes reserving spaces, learning the dance, advertising, building roles for each leadership member to play during the workshop, and lots of rehearsals to ensure we are prepared to teach.

Experiential Learning 

Explain how your activity demonstrates the values of the Honors Program Experiential Learning category you selected. 

Building a new RSO is not easy, but what's made it feasible is constant collaboration between me and my teammates and a common goal: to share our love for Chinese Dance. Translating that vision into workshops will require a plethora of tasks: connecting with the IMA and ECC to reserve rooms, talking with our advisor, borrowing equipment from our dance teachers, creating promotional materials, and holding weekly 2 hour rehearsals are all tasks we do frequently in order to prepare for workshops. My guiding role is to create an environment that is comfortable to learn in and teach dance to our attendees. While daunting, this experience has already changed the way I look at leaders and the effort they put into creating a positive experience.

How and why did you select this engagement? What skills or experiences do you hope to gain from it?

I've always loved dance and I frequently use it as an outlet to escape from my STEM-dominated academic life. I believe that engaging in dance can be exercise and a meditative process. Thus, selecting this engagement felt natural as a way to take a bigger role in creating that kind of community at UW. However, teaching dance is completely different from teaching math, and learning techniques to teach dance will be extremely difficult, so I'm looking forward to developing those! Attending workshops has always been a magical experience for me, so I plan on working extremely hard to create that same sort of environment. I'm extremely excited to be on the other side of a workshop and to share my enthusiasm and passion for dance.

How does this activity connect to your concurrent or past coursework? How does it speak to your broader education goals and experiences?

I came into college knowing that I wanted to do a dance minor, but after making my 4-year plan, I knew that I wouldn't have space. So, my engagement with this RSO is my way of continuing my journey with dance, although I won't be able to explicitly connect it to classes or coursework. I do enjoy exploring dance through other lenses, and I recently spoke about it in a video narrative tackling Anti-Asian violence in Chinatown, as it's a large part of my identity. Broadly, my educational goals at UW are to expand my skillset and scope of knowledge - since most of my classes are science, this activity is a unique way for me to learn new methods of self-expression and teaching, as well as connect to different RSO's and organizations on campus.

How will your activity contribute to the larger goals of the organization/your partners?

My activity will fulfill the main goals of my RSO, which are to spread Chinese dance and Chinese culture through creating a comfortable environment and providing opportunities to engage with dance. The studios we use, which are located in the Cultural Center and the IMA, connect closely with our goals as the ECC facility is dedicated to providing a space for cultural events and the IMA is for exercise and physical well-being, both of which we accomplish through our workshops. Our RSO advisor, Trevor, is dedicated to special interest and performing arts RSOs. So, our workshops fit nicely with his areas of interest and expertise as well!

Reflection

A common complaint from students at big colleges is that they have trouble finding a community. Through my dance RSO, Traditional Chinese Dance, I knew that I wanted to tackle this issue by offering spaces for students to get together, have fun, and share interests. But, I didn't know how much starting this project would change me as a leader and as a dancer.

In the days leading up to the first workshop, I was plagued with questions: would the students like it? Was I experienced enough to lead? How would I connect with participants? How could I make this worth their time? Ultimately deciding to just wing it and have as much fun as I could, I quickly learned while doing the workshop that the most important part to being a good teacher was connecting with the people there by expressing everything that I was feeling through dance and communicating those emotions to them, so that they could feel the same things I did. Although I had zero experience teaching going into this event, I ended the workshop feeling confident in my job as a teacher because I could see the students picking up the choreography and embodying the movements, and that made me feel amazing.

In addition, I've been feeling 'stuck' since quitting dance during the pandemic; I never got closure on a huge part of my life since it ended so abruptly and I knew that I wouldn't be able to continue dancing in the same way at college. After teaching this workshop, I feel like I've finally stepped into the next chapter of my relationship with dance, and that I can stop reminiscing on all of my old memories and instead work towards making new ones. As a teacher, I hope to take my favorite parts of dancing (the emotion and the storytelling) and share that with other people in an explicit way, instead of implicitly through performing.

At the end of the workshop, I was elated to see people taking photos with each other and gathering in small groups to record videos of their performances. It was one thing to imagine that a group I created could bring people together, but actually seeing people exchange contact information and strike up a conversation at my event was still incredibly surreal. I came away with this first workshop with a lot of motivation to continue putting on events that could provide this type of community and gratitude towards my fellow executive members of TCD that I'd worked with to plan and execute this event. In the future, I'm definitely hoping to continue working with my executive team, the IMA, and my advisor to further clean and improve the logistical details of the workshop. Planning this workshop took a lot more time than I thought it would, and it was very challenging to balance alongside my hard academic quarter and my other extracurriculars. So, I'm also very glad that from here on out I'll have much more time to just fine-tune and reflect.

I'd spoken in my original application about how I felt that founding TCD was my way of engaging with the dance classes that I wouldn't be able to take during college. After this experience, while I still agree with that sentiment, I also believe that this event did connect to my current classwork this quarter through the course Science and Human Values. The way we process emotion and how dance elicits visceral reactions and emotions is all in our body, but how we can relate those emotions to others and share the joy of dancing (literally), gives insight into many of our human values. One of my personal goals this quarter was to bring my academic learning outside of the classroom, and through this eye-opening and fun experience, I feel very satisfied with my accomplishments.

This is the flyer that we put on TVs in dorm lobbies that circulate opportunities. Advertising for this event was probably one of the most unanticipated challenges we had because I didn't realize how difficult it would be to get the word out on a 40,000 students campus :'). I learned a lot about creating visually appealing posters/flyers to generate attention and how to utilize other RSO's, friends, and resources provided by the university (like the TVs and elevator posters) to help spread the message.

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