Join Desi Rainbow Parents and Allies and coLAB Arts in celebration of the artistry of Jin Won and her original commissioned dancework based on the oral histories of the Desi Rainbow community.
The Trueselves Oral History and Art Commissioning Project is a 5-year collaboration with community partners in Middlesex County that serve the transgender and larger LGBTQ+ community. All of the creative work is inspired by the oral histories of the experiences of trans-identifying persons as well as networks of families, friends, and professional health care providers who support them.
“It’s not just a physical transformation, it’s like a mental, spiritual transformation as well because you can’t change your body that much without transforming in every other way, too.”
This year's project pays special attention to the experiences of the South Asian LGBTQ+ community and the work of Desi Rainbow Parents and Allies.
' The Butterfly's Dream ' is an interdisciplinary live performance devised by Kathak dancer and tabla player Jin Won and director Yong-Suk Yoo of Korean origin. Inspired by the motif of the transformative process of the cocoon into a butterfly, the performance suggests a personal rite of passage through self-actualization and enlightenment by integrating Kathak dance, sound collage, and theatrical storytelling with a flavor of Korean shamanism aesthetics.
This event will run approximately 90 minutes and feature an original dance piece by Jin Won and Yong-Suk Yoo immediately followed by an expert panel composed of researchers, educators, and advocacy partners who will discuss the intersections of APIDA (API and Desi American) and LGBTQ advocacy in the State of NJ.
To find out more about the full range of Life-Course Oral Histories and the past artist commissions check out www.colab-arts.org/trueselves
Special thanks to the ongoing partnership with the Pride Center of New Jersey.
Grant funding has been provided by the Middlesex County Board of County Commissioners through a grant award from the Middlesex County Cultural and Arts Trust Fund.
This is a free event with limited seating. Please register your group in advance. You will receive a confirmation email a day after your registration. For questions and/or special requests, email us at info@colab-arts.org
Venue Information
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Artists Credits
Lead Performer: Jin Won
Director: Yongsuk Yoo
Music : Rushi Vakil
Assistant Production Manager : Mike Lukshis
Costume : Kasbee
Volunteers : Aruna Rao, Aarya Kansara, Akhila Mantri, Maithili Patel, Nikhil Prabhu, Shivam Tripathi, Vivek Shenoy
In collaboration with:
Our Panelists
Jin Won (she/her) (Choreographer and Performer)
Praised by the NY Times as “an exuberant dancer whose musicality transform[s] her dancing into something primal," dancer and percussionist Jin Won is a one-of-a-kind artist in the field of Indian performing arts who explores the sonic and visual possibilities of rhythm through dance and music. An accomplished Kathak dancer and tabla player of South Korean origin, she spent over 15 years in India training in Indian classical percussion and dance under Pandit Divyang Vakil and Shrimati Shubha Desai, respectively. During these artistically formative years, Jin began working with renowned Indian choreographers, established herself as a solo dancer, and performed internationally in countries such as Belgium, Canada, and Korea.
While equally adept at traditional and contemporary presentations of Kathak and tabla, Won’s latest endeavors are explorations of rhythm as a unifier across cultural expressions. Since moving to the United States in 2011, Jin has collaborated with Korean and Arabic traditional artists and incorporated a multitude of percussion instruments from around the world into her work.
In 2013, Jin and her Guru Pt. Divyang Vakil collaborated on an experimental Kathak production featuring world percussion that was focused on rhythm as the primary mode of expression. Entitled Pradhanica, which translates as “female leader”, this production highlights the commanding presence of Jin as a solo dancer. After debuting at the Drive East Festival in NYC to much acclaim, the prestigious Princeton Festival invited Jin to present Pradhanica as their first venture outside the realm of the Western Classical tradition. In conjunction with the festival, NJ PBS released a short documentary on Jin’s life and artistic journey along with her team.
Taking its name from her debut work, in 2018 Jin founded the “Pradhanica Dance and Music Company” to harbor her growing repertoire of projects and choreography.
Her latest work includes 2 dance films: Willow, which was commissioned in 2021 by the World Music Institute for their annual “Dancing the Gods” festival, and Beyond the Seas, which is selected for presentation at the “Women in Dance” conference to be held in Chicago in October of 2022. As well, her original 20-minute contemporary dance piece was commissioned by the New Narrative Film Festival in Taipei, Taiwan as their closing finale.
Jin has performed at venues such as Battery Dance Festival (Battery Park, NYC) Kennedy Center (Washington, DC), Symphony Space (NYC), and Lone Tree Arts Center (CO) among many others. She has also conducted master classes and workshops at arts institutions across the US such as the University of Illinois, Middlesex County Cultural Arts and Heritage Commission (NJ), Quad City Arts (IL), and Darke County Center for the Arts (OH), Lincoln Center Atrium(NYC).
John Keller (he,him) (coLAB Arts Trueselves Project Producer)
John Keller is the coLAB Arts Director of Education and has over 20 years of experience in theater performance and production, arts education and administration, and socially engaged arts curriculum development. John is committed to creating projects that use the arts as a lens to examine complex issues that affect community as well as an instrument for impact. While serving as Director of Education for coLAB Arts, John has produced main-stage productions and initiated educational residencies, and teacher professional development series in several central New Jersey schools. Areas of focus have included social science research and arts programs in Domestic Violence Prevention, Transgender Healthcare, Immigration, Economic Justice, and Juvenile Justice System Reform. John earned his undergraduate degree at Holy Cross and holds a Masters in Fine Arts in Acting from Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts. He currently teaches Theater for Social Development at Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts.
Aruna Rao (she/her) (Desi Rainbow Parents & Allies Founder and Executive Director)Aruna Rao is the proud parent of a transgender young adult. She is the founder and Executive Director of Desi Rainbow Parents & Allies, an organization that supports South Asian immigrants with LGBTQ+ children and LGBTQ+ South Asians. She serves on the national board of PFLAG, has two decades of experience as a mental health advocate and non profit leader, and her interests lie at the intersection of mental health and diversity. Aruna is deeply invested in building a world where diversity of sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression are respected, valued, and affirmed by all.
Christina Briskin (she,her) (coLAB Arts Trueselves Project Co-Curator)
Chrissy Briskin is an artist and educator who has been involved in co-curating the TrueSelves archive for the last six years. She has a B.A. in English Literature and History from Rutgers University. Chrissy has been a public educator for almost twenty years and is currently pursuing a graduate degree in Culture, Society, and Education through the Rutgers Graduate School of Education. Through coLAB Arts, The Pride Center and Robert Wood Johnson, Chrissy has been very lucky and honored to be a part of the TrueSelves projects as an interviewer, transcriber, and performer. It has been a wonderful experience to join the work she has done through coLAB with her education work to create an inclusive classroom, as well as being able to educate her colleagues on many of the questions surrounding the LGBTQ+ community and how schools can better serve its members. She currently lives in Neshanic Station with her wonderful husband and fur babies. You can reach her at cbriskin@colab-arts.org
Sima Kumar (she/her) (Board Member of Make Us Visible, NJ)
Sima Kumar (she/her) is a Board Member of Make Us Visible NJ, a New Jersey educator and mother who moderated an interdisciplinary exploration of Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences in the United States with poet Alison Roh Park and documentary filmmaker Angel Velasco Shaw. She also published an article in NJEA Review called Asian American in America’s Literary Heritage that explored the origins of the invisibility of Asian and Asian American literature and history in the K-12 curricula and provided a pedagogical approach to creating more inclusive curricula to meet the needs of the increasingly multiracial and multiethnic demography of students in the public school classroom. She testified at Assembly and Senate Education Committee meetings. Currently, she is involved in a curriculum development project through OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates out of Washington, D.C., which is being spearheaded by Ting-Yi Oie and is also collaborating on the AAPI Digital Textbook Project with colleagues at UCLA.
Yongsuk Yoo (Director) (he/him) is an international director and educator who focuses on interdisciplinary work and the integration of technology into the performing arts. His experimental work includes multimedia theatre production of When Spring Comes to Hills and Dales, Oedipus the King, immersive theatre productions of A Dream Play and Love and Information, as well as the Korean premiere of Nassim Sloeimanpour’s White Rabbit, Red Rabbit. He has also written his own pieces, such as A Silent Table, which used live broadcasting technology, immersive performance, and four-sided holo-film projection mapping. He is currently assistant professor of directing at Texas State University, and former faculty at Daeduk University and Hanyang University in South Korea.