EAST WEST FEST to be Offered by Asian Cultural Council

The Asian Cultural Council will current East West Fest, a celebration of storytelling-in terms, past text, and through the senses. Featuring storytellers from across the arts, this competition queries not only how we tell tales, but who tells the tale?

Jogging Might 3-11, 2021, this four-section on line sequence associates with artists, performers, writers, dining establishments, and cultural workers with a deep effects in Asian/American communities. This inaugural festival culminates in Asian Cultural Council’s fifth East-West Dialogue showcasing Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen and multimedia artist Tiffany Chung, both equally past ACC grantees.

“East West Fest is a celebration of a group coming jointly by means of art, offering ourselves permission to practical experience and express joy, and unapologetically using charge of our individual tales,” states ACC Producer Chris Ignacio and ACC Director of Advertising and marketing & Communications Stephanie Chen. “The arranging of this pageant began in late 2020, with the intent to rejoice Asian/American voices. Whilst the rise of anti-Asian sentiment is not new, the latest amplified media coverage of racially motivated assaults highlights the great importance of speaking up as a neighborhood and having pride in our multifaceted cultural identities. We are not a person voice, but a effective refrain of intersecting tales”

East West Fest opens on May well 3 with Notify Me: Storytelling With Phrases. Curated by The Sống Collective, artists from distinctive mediums share how they’re producing space for Asian-centered stories. From epic retellings of literary classics to slick hip hop melodies, these tales take a look at the complex multitude of voices and experiences that advise what it suggests to be Asian in The us. Collaborating artists incorporate Anu Bhatt, Ruby Ibarra, C.B. Lee, Joe Ngo, Stacy Nguyen, Bao Phi, and Sara Porkalob.

Curated by dance performer-choreographer-educator Mai Lê Hô, See Me: Storytelling Beyond Text requires spot on Could 4 and options musicians and dancers who share stories that transcend language.

Meals will take heart phase on May 10 with Share Me: Storytelling Via Food items. From driving the scenes with the founders of the most up-to-date dessert fad #Baonanas, to an personal glimpse into the function of Mail Chinatown Love, audiences get a flavor of how stories can be explained to as a result of meals.

On May perhaps 11, East West Fest culminates with Hear Me: Viet Thanh Nguyen & Tiffany Chung featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen and multimedia artist Tiffany Chung talk about how they do the job to reclaim their personal narratives, and what we can do to make certain our stories are read.

All situations are free to the general public and will take position at 7 PM EDT. Please check out www.asianculturalcouncil.org/eastwestfest for much more info or sign-up at https://eastwestfest.eventbrite.com.

About the Members

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer gained the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and several other awards. His most current publication is the sequel to The Sympathizer, The Fully commited. His other textbooks are a quick story assortment, The Refugees Nothing At any time Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the Countrywide Guide Award in nonfiction and the Countrywide Guide Critics Circle Award in Basic Nonfiction) and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian The us. He has also released Chicken of the Sea, a children’s e book composed in collaboration with his 6-12 months-aged son, Ellison. He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Research and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. A receiver of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, he is also a contributing view author for the New York Times and the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Life.

Viet Thanh Nguyen been given an ACC Fellowship in 2010 to investigate photography and memory in Vietnam.

Tiffany Chung (Vietnam/United states) is internationally noted for her investigate-based installations and cartographic performs that look at conflict, environmental catastrophe, development, and compelled migration in relation to the heritage of unique areas across time and terrain. Her work remaps historical and cultural memories of traumatized topographies results in interventions into the political narratives created by way of statecraft with people’s remembrance and unpacks pressured displacement and refugee migration within just the sophisticated framework of political, social, financial, and environmental processes, impacted by war destruction and local weather catastrophe. Chung was awarded the Sharjah Biennial Artist Prize (2013), named Jane Lombard Fellow for Artwork & Social Justice at the Vera Listing Center, New College (2018-2020), and honored with the 2020 Asia Arts Recreation Changer Awards India by Asia Society. Her approaching projects will be offered at the Dallas Museum of Artwork and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fantastic Arts Museum.

Tiffany Chung received an ACC Fellowship in 2015 toward investigation in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia on web pages of previous Vietnamese refugee camps.

The Sống Collective was started by Vietnamese Theatre artists: David Lee Huynh, Carolina Đỗ, and Jonathan Castanien, in the spring of 2019 as a reaction to the United States’ sharp cuts to refugee resettlement in the encounter of a global refugee crisis. The Sống Collective’s mission is to reclaim the Vietnamese American narrative by creating growth and overall performance chances for rising artists of color. We nurture a community of artists whose perform explores concerns of identification, race, intersectionality, immigration, and the refugee experience. We are committed to telling tales that dare to subvert preconceptions of Asian Us citizens.

Mai Lê Hô is a French-Vietnamese dance performer-choreographer-educator, DJ and curator who relocated from Paris to NYC in 2009. In 2015 Mai Lê launched LayeRhythm Jam, a monthly efficiency event that provides live musicians to collaborate with road/club dancers. Considering that 2019, the venture has been getting its club roots to the phase with The LayeRhythm Experiment company, undertaking at 92Y, Jacob’s Pillow, Purdue College (on line), Bridge Road Theater (on-line), and offering virtual instructional packages for emcees, musicians and dancers. These days Mai Lê is the Govt and Creative Director of LayeRhythm Productions INC, a non-gain dedicated to highlighting freestyle voices in general performance art. Mai Lê has been a core dancer in the groundbreaking road dance theater organization Rennie Harris PureMovement since 2013, and in the rising Passion Fruit dance business considering that 2016.

Mail Chinatown Adore is a New York dependent, entirely volunteer run group, whose target is to supply relief to tiny, immigrant-owned, Chinatown firms impacted by the outcomes of COVID-19. Considering that the commencing of the pandemic, Chinatowns across New York have endured drastically. Continue to be at property orders, coupled with a rise in Anti-Asian racism and xenophobia, has meant lowered foot website traffic and tourism. At the exact same time, most Chinatown firms were rejected for federal government financial loans owing to software specifications inequitable to immigrant run microbusinesses. Focusing on income-only, pen-and-paper enterprises that aren’t ready to use gift card, donation, or application supply alternatives, Send Chinatown Appreciate facilitates neighborhood assistance by producing electronic platforms for organizations in need to have so that they may possibly be equipped to sustain themselves now and in the potential. https://www.sendchinatownlove.com/

#Baonanas is a banana pudding sensation based in Jersey Town. Started by descendants of Filipino immigrants, born and elevated in the country’s most varied town, #Baonanas celebrates the Philippines’ abundant culinary flavors. Influenced by and rooted in neighborhood, #Baonanas employs its system to share tales of individuals who place their coronary heart into whatsoever they’re baonanas for.