Hannah Joo is an artist, educator, and program builder rooted in decolonial praxis. From June 3–10, she will serve as the GYOPO x LA Phil Project Co-Curator of the Dance Performance Showcase at the Seoul Festival at Walt Disney Concert Hall. With deep experience in dance, healing arts, and cultural programming, Joo brings a powerful, diasporic lens to the festival’s exploration of Korean performance and identity.
Hannah Joo: For me, decolonial praxis is about envisioning and putting into practice a way of life outside of colonial, capitalistic, and racist structures that define our current realities. It is at once a spiritual practice that honors the wisdom of ancestors who existed before and battled against colonization, a creative practice where we can research, experiment, rehearse, and play out liberatory futures, and a material practice that demands we make conscious choices every day to dissent. My artistic, academic, and community-based selves are all interconnected and rooted in the same goal of bridging the understanding of oppressive structures to the active dismantling of them. To make art is to (un)learn is to connect to others more meaningfully. Each space provides a different way for people to gather and support one another, but the essence is the same – it’s about coming together to share knowledge and resources, dream up new realities, and harness our communal power to carry on the work of building revolution that has passed down from our elders. In this current moment, where the grasps of colonialism tighten through occupation, genocide, deportation, incarceration, and climate disaster, we must
collectively answer any and every call for resistance.
How have projects like Body as a Crossroads and Heal Her Retreats shaped your view of the body in healing and resistance?
Hannah Joo: These projects have been extremely formative and have served as important guideposts for me. Both offer spaces for a lifelong practice of cultivating of a body-spirit connection, understanding the body as a central site for resistance, healing, and change making. A core value and lesson I have taken from this work is to observe, through our bodies, how colonization, capitalism, and racism, demand tangible corporeal costs – whether it is to make us entirely too exhausted to rebel, or to sever our bodies’ relationship to nature, or to literally organize our bodies into isolation and segregation. Healing our bodies is synonymous to healing our spirit, to healing ourselves from the costs of living under oppression. Working on these projects have given me the opportunity to follow in the legacy of revolutionaries who have taught us that engaging with our bodies through movement is at the core of deconditioning our acceptance of the status quo, to live out radical possibilities of being even under oppressive conditions, and to connect to the ancestral wisdom that inherently live in our bodies.
Hannah Joo: Archiving and collective memories have long been a passion of mine, and these projects utilize it as a core tool for remembrance as resistance. Having vast archives and documentation is often a luxury of privileged communities whilst marginalized groups have their histories continuously erased, made inaccessible, or construed into a narrative to serve the oppressor. To actively create and rebuild archives, and to engage and be in conversation with them, is to take up space where we have been told we are not welcomed, and to remind us we are not alone in our struggles – many have gone through the same fights before us. Poet and writer Ocean Vuong writes that “the truth is memory has not forgotten us.” For many of us in the diaspora, we experience a historical amnesia where our memories have been overridden and replaced with an image of America as a hero-savior country that cradles them in warm and loving arms, instead of being the country most responsible for their displacement and suffering. But memory has not forgotten us. We can find our way to return to it. Collective Memories and the May 19th Project seek to return to memory. They speak to radical histories of different diasporic Asian American communities taking hold of their shared experiences with US imperialism, militarism, and racism to strengthen their solidarities both within the Asian community and to other BIPOC communities. It makes me feel honored to be part of a tradition that has always been rooted in revolution and reminds me of our responsibility to carry on that tradition.
You’ve performed both contemporary and traditional Korean dance. How do you balance or blend these styles?
Hannah Joo: This is something I’m very much in the middle exploring and developing! What does the embodiment of a diasporic Korean experience look like? What are the bodily aesthetics that emerge from inheriting histories of occupation and war from my grandparents and parents’ generations? What are the implications of performing resistance as a person who grew up in the country that still occupies my people’s homeland? I feel like the idea of “blending” can often oversimplify the richness of diaspora and reinforce the idea that the homeland is at the center while diasporic communities are at the peripheries. I don’t expect there to be a clear stylistic movement vocabulary that emerges from these questions. Rather, I’m more interested in remaining in an ever changing and shifting movement practice that responds to these questions, so that I may fully speak to the way that our histories, experiences, and memories are constantly entangled.
Can you tell us about your movement practice around Korean diaspora grief rituals? What inspired it?
Hannah Joo: I was deeply impacted by the passing of my maternal grandmother. The personal loss of a close family member was tied up with the loss of a cultural anchor, the loss of someone who had lived through the end of Japanese occupation, the Korean war, displacement and migration, the journey to building a new home and community in the States. The loss was larger than anything I could handle on my own, and I could barely contain the weight of her trauma and joy and pain and love within me. It led me to lean on my family and community in a new way. Part of that process was to participate in grieving and mourning rituals, including the 49-day funeral rite rituals and an annual 제사 memorial. As a part of these rituals, there are sacred choreographies – the way you approach and greet an altar, the layout of offerings for ancestors, the dance of prayer. A movement practice is already built into our traditions of mourning and remembrance. In incorporating diasporic grieving ritual into a movement practice, we can grieve consistently, beyond the designated mourning periods around someone’s passing. The dance of grieving my 할머니 was not only for the loss of a family member but all the struggles she endured to make life possible, struggles tied to state violence and power play at the expense of our people. Grief becomes a constant state, and ritual allows us to generate a life force from it. My grief continues as long as my love for my grandma lives on, and as long as we have to live through death by state violence. Rituals, whether they are passed down or created a new, remind us to choose life and love. May we never become desensitized to the past and present of state sanctioned harm, and may we channel our grief to access our right to rage, love, and liberation.
Hannah Joo: The greatest gift of being part of this dance group is that I get to interact with so many elders from the Korean community. Whether I am dancing with them or dancing for them, I am constantly surrounded by so much wisdom and care of those who carry more experience than me. There is the aspect of inheriting Korean history through the dances and music, but with it, stories of migration, of raising families, of providing for one another. We get to build tradition together, and it makes lineage feel like something that is comforting, safe, and always close by.
How do you bring your creative work into your ethnic studies teaching? What kind of impact do you see on your students?
Hannah Joo: Ethnic Studies is an academic field that was created out of widespread student protests, encampments, and strikes that were tied to the racial justice, anti-war, anti-imperialist movements of the 60s and 70s. I aim to honor that spirit by deemphasizing academic performance and inviting my classmates to really bring in their own lived experiences through creative projects like oral history, podcasts, documentaries – platforms that will ask them to connect their research directly to issues in their communities. They are asked to interrogate their own communities, the roles they place within them, and see that their histories deserve to be understood and studied critically. Being given permission to be creative in an academic setting challenges them to explore their agency as students and the potential for change-making that they have by being in a collective space at school.
Hannah Joo: Being a part of GYOPO has really challenged my scarcity mentality and celebrated the abundance in the Korean diaspora – the abundance of resources, art, community – that can be channeled towards mutual aid, collective care, and organizing. GYOPO is a group that seeks to move relationally, not transactionally, requiring us center intersectional and intergenerational lenses in our friendships, partnerships, and collaborations. This program’s title of refractions really speaks to the expansiveness of our community that allows us to both reflect critically on our shared histories and feel at home in our shared futures.
You often talk about “collective liberation.” What does that look like in your art and community work?
Hannah Joo: Liberation is about moving past inclusion and representation and truly dismantling harmful power structures to replace them with equitable ones, and while I can understand liberation through a distinctly Korean and Asian perspective, collective liberation acknowledges that no one can be free until everyone is free, that my community’s liberation must be undeniably tied to the liberation of all other communities. I aim to be a lifelong student of liberatory movements, taking the teachings of revolutionary thinkers, leaders, artists, collectives, and asking where I can apply their work in my everyday life.
How do you take care of yourself while balancing art, teaching, and activism?
Hannah Joo: Lots of sleeping and lots of help from other people! Balancing also means constantly shifting rather than finding a final ending point, so I try to always be listening intuitively to understand where my energies are most needed and what kind of work will allow me to best show up for other people meaningfully.
At GYOPO’s Diasporic Refractions during the LA Phil’s Seoul Festival, what will you be sharing, and why is this event important to you?
Hannah Joo: I supported with the curation of the Diasporic Refractions Pre-Concert Performances, which will feature works by Sharon Chohi Kim, Hwa Records, Ariel Osterweis, and Young Sun Han—all diasporic Korean artists who ignite resistance from the spaces between memory and manifestation. These artists have long been pillars in their own communities, bringing light to the multigenerational work of struggle and liberation from a Korean diasporic lens, and deepening our connections to one another through performance, ritual, and embodiment. Their gathering feels especially timely, as the impacts of occupation, genocide, deportation, incarceration, and climate disaster reveal to us that old systems are cracking. These artists invite us to join them in the work of imagining and activating our cultural memory, where we are simultaneously haunted by cycles of violence and nourished by our very real capacity to heal and act. With the Diasporic Refractions Pre-Concert Performances, we hope to highlight the importance of creation. These artists create for us and with us, creating community, memory, and futures that sustain life and love.
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