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BS: And something else that I know you're involved in is you're a dancer with dance collective, and have you been able to incorporate your identity with your art?

SB: Yeah, so again, my friend, Gabrielle, who brought me into the JACL, she is also a mixed race, Asian American identified person. And, you know, she and I over the years have had a lot of conversations about what it means to be mixed race and what it means to be Japanese American, what it means to be a queer person, right? Like, there's a lot of intersectionality going on there. And I feel really, really lucky that she's not only an incredible friend, but an incredible, like, leader and a credible activist, and an amazing choreographer. And so she has choreographed a number of pieces over the years that are about identity, about intersectionality, about intergenerational trauma, about the Japanese American experience, about being mixed race. It's a lot of things coming together. And so it's been really cool to explore my own identity, through movement and being able to share that with folks who either do identify similarly or have never had those experiences before. And just being able to live that truth, I think, is very different than what a lot of other folks have been able to do in the past, and being able to celebrate that has been a really, really neat experience that I think is pretty unique.

BS: Yeah, definitely. And would you... like do you put on shows? Is that what, from what I understand?

SB: Yeah we've performed at a number of different places. Most recently, we did a piece at the... what do they call it? The Seattle Moon Viewing festival that happens at the Seattle Japanese Garden. And so they asked Gabrielle like, "Hey, do you want to come and do this piece at the garden?" So we got to go perform there. Oh, yeah, we did a dance piece on intergenerational trauma for Densho recently for their annual fundraiser, which was all online. But we did it live, which was really neat. And we got grant funding through a number of different sources to perform a piece that Gabrielle had written and choreographed several years ago, it's called Farewell Shikata Ga Nai, which is kind of... it's about the incarceration experience through a couple of different lenses. But we got grant funding to take this piece and go and perform it at different schools around the greater Seattle area. And so we performed it for, like we went to -- speaking of relationships -- we took it to North Seattle College, because I still have a relationship with folks there. We took it to a number of like middle schools, grade schools, and then we did talk backs afterwards. So we do the dance and then we would talk to the students about what it was about and what the experience was, what it meant to us, you know, as dancers, and they got to ask questions, it was a really fun experience.

BS: That sounds like a really cool experience to have.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2022 Seattle Chapter JACL. All Rights Reserved.