Reading Multiraciality in Dance: An Interview with Miya Shaffer

Mixed Asian Media - May 9, 2022

By Jacob Campbell

Looking back at my time as an undergraduate dance major at UCLA, I recognize that I was hungry to leverage the choreographic process to explore my mixed-Asian identity. At times, this felt like lonely work without mentors and models to help grapple with what it means to embody multiraciality and make it more visible through movement. So, when my alma mater posted on Instagram about a new course titled “Performing Multiculturalism​​​​​​​​” led by doctoral candidate Miya Shaffer, I was eager to learn more about her work which positions multiraciality as a way of reading dance.

Tell us about yourself — who is Miya?

I am currently a PhD candidate in Culture and Performance in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA. I’m in my fifth year, so I'm working on writing my dissertation, which is about theorizing a multiracial analytic for dance interpretation. I am also a dancer and a performer, and I consider myself a collaborator in both of those pursuits. I am from Toronto, Canada, and I moved to Los Angeles to attend UCLA about five years ago, and that’s when I really started to get to know and appreciate all of the wonderful artistic and academic opportunities here.

I'm curious how dance became part of your life. How were you introduced to it, and how did you know that it was something you wanted to keep as part of your journey?

I was enrolled in ballet classes at a very young age, but it took me a while to really love dancing. Around age 14, I decided to pursue a much more rigorous pre-professional training program in ballet and modern in Toronto, while also attending a conservatory arts high school in Toronto. The dance programs that I was part of really introduced me to the richness that dance offers as a physical practice but also as an intellectual and philosophical practice.

What a beautiful answer. I’m wondering how your mixed identity comes into play as a dancer. Does that ever enter the equation for you?

One of the things that drew me to think about mixedness and dance was its simultaneous visibility and invisibility. I trained in ballet and modern, and those styles bring a specific racialized understanding of a dancer. It was one that I, in many ways, fit into. These are practices that typically imagine a white dancer. However, in the past 15-20 years, we've started to see quite a significant presence of Asian dancers also involved in these two fields of dance. As someone who identifies with both Asian and white backgrounds, I never had a moment of thinking that I didn't fit into the imagined bodies that ballet and modern put forth. As part of my training program, we would tour around to different theaters and perform for children. These performances often consisted of the same set of dances that we would do year after year, and I noticed that I was being cast in the same roles previously held by someone who looked similar to me. Typically, this person was of Asian background with a slim body type and that would kind of be the standard person who would play that particular role even though these were not narrative performances. There was no need to have a particular face attached to a particular position. That was when it occurred to me: there are moments that my racialized presence matters in dance and then there are moments that it (quote unquote) does not. Further, being mixed race might impact feeling as though one can go from being less visibly to more visibly racialized.

Fascinating! Research can be a tool to answer those deeper questions we have about ourselves and our experiences. What are some of the research questions that are driving your work and your dissertation?

I came into graduate school with the idea that I was going to research mixed race identity in contemporary U.S.-based dance. I was going to look at choreographers who self-identified as multiracial and think about how these codes and experiences of multiraciality were represented in contemporary dance. I discovered there wasn't a lot of material to look at, so I considered alternative ways to conceptualize what multiracialism is in relation to dance. There are so many things that make dance unique: We don't often speak in a dance. We perform with our bodies. The movement that we perform is often improvised or abstract, so it doesn't necessarily tell a narrative. When we watch a dance, we're often expected to figure out what the dance means — just by looking at it. Unlike a film or theatrical production in which a character gives us information that will then shape how we understand what's going on, we watch dance unfold on a stage and think, “How do I make sense of this?” With those ideas in mind, I thought, maybe we need an alternative way that dance activates ideas about multiracialism that are not limited to only self-identified multiracial artists representing multiracial identity. What would it mean to interpret dance from a perspective that foregrounds discourses of multiraciality and that draws out ideas about how multiraciality constructs relationships between bodies and the social world in general?

I can't wait to read your dissertation! You’re teaching a new course at UCLA that is tied to your dissertation. Could you give us a sneak peek into what students might expect to learn in your class?

I have a new course called “Performing Multiracialism: Theorizing and Interpreting Mixed Race Representation in 21st Century Performances.” The premise of this class is that we are approaching the category of multiracial or mixed race as a performative construct — something that is brought into the world through a series of repeated acts, behaviors, movements, and so on. We are letting go of the idea that multiracialism is a static identity category that you just align yourself with and that's that. Instead, we are thinking about the ways that ideas about what it means to be multiracial, what a multiracial person looks like, and what a multiracial experience consists of are performatively created through the media and artistic representation that we encounter in our lives. We'll be looking at dances, theatrical productions, TV episodes, films, and social media examples to think about how the category of multiraciality is constructed and then circulated throughout these various aesthetic forms that then allow the spectator or the viewer to understand what multiraciality is. We’ll end up thinking about this multiracial analytic that I'm working on for my dissertation. So, we’ll first discuss how multiraciality as a concept is created. Then, we’ll move on to think about how that concept might be activated as a position of looking and interpreting.

What an exciting and necessary course. I'm really excited for your students!

Learn more about Miya Shaffer at www.miyashaffer.com.

Jacob Campbell (he/him) is a California-based graduate student with research interests at the intersection of education, popular culture, and critical mixed race studies. Follow him on Instagram @campbells0up.