EAST WEST FEST to be Presented by Asian Cultural Council

The Asian Cultural Council will present East West Fest, a celebration of storytelling-in words, beyond text, and by means of the senses. Showcasing storytellers from throughout the arts, this pageant concerns not only how we inform tales, but who tells the tale?

Running Might 3-11, 2021, this four-portion on the net collection companions with artists, performers, writers, restaurants, and cultural staff with a deep impression in Asian/American communities. This inaugural festival culminates in Asian Cultural Council’s fifth East-West Dialogue showcasing Pulitzer Prize-winning creator Viet Thanh Nguyen and multimedia artist Tiffany Chung, both preceding ACC grantees.

“East West Fest is a celebration of a group coming collectively via art, offering ourselves authorization to experience and categorical joy, and unapologetically having cost of our own stories,” claims ACC Producer Chris Ignacio and ACC Director of Marketing and advertising & Communications Stephanie Chen. “The arranging of this pageant started in late 2020, with the intent to rejoice Asian/American voices. Even though the rise of anti-Asian sentiment is not new, new amplified media coverage of racially determined assaults highlights the importance of talking up as a group and taking satisfaction in our multifaceted cultural identities. We are not one particular voice, but a highly effective refrain of intersecting stories”

East West Fest opens on Might 3 with Explain to Me: Storytelling With Words. Curated by The Sống Collective, artists from distinct mediums share how they’re producing room for Asian-centered tales. From epic retellings of literary classics to slick hip hop melodies, these tales examine the complex multitude of voices and ordeals that notify what it suggests to be Asian in America. Participating artists consist of 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 Over and above Words and phrases requires place on May perhaps 4 and functions musicians and dancers who share stories that transcend language.

Food takes centre phase on May possibly 10 with Share Me: Storytelling Through Foodstuff. From behind the scenes with the founders of the most current dessert trend #Baonanas, to an intimate seem into the do the job of Ship Chinatown Like, audiences get a taste of how tales can be informed by food.

On Might 11, East West Fest culminates with Listen to Me: Viet Thanh Nguyen & Tiffany Chung featuring Pulitzer Prize-profitable creator Viet Thanh Nguyen and multimedia artist Tiffany Chung explore how they do the job to reclaim their very own narratives, and what we can do to make absolutely sure our stories are read.

All events are absolutely free to the public and will take put at 7 PM EDT. Make sure you pay a visit to www.asianculturalcouncil.org/eastwestfest for far more info or register at https://eastwestfest.eventbrite.com.

About the Members

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and numerous other awards. His most modern publication is the sequel to The Sympathizer, The Dedicated. His other textbooks are a quick story collection, The Refugees Almost nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Guide Award in nonfiction and the National E-book Critics Circle Award in Basic Nonfiction) and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian The usa. He has also posted Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book created in collaboration with his six-calendar year-aged son, Ellison. He is a College Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the College of Southern California. A recipient 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 analysis images and memory in Vietnam.

Tiffany Chung (Vietnam/United states) is internationally noted for her research-dependent installations and cartographic performs that take a look at conflict, environmental disaster, progress, and forced migration in relation to the historical past of precise locations across time and terrain. Her get the job done remaps historical and cultural memories of traumatized topographies makes interventions into the political narratives created by statecraft with people’s remembrance and unpacks compelled displacement and refugee migration within just the advanced framework of political, social, economic, and environmental processes, impacted by war destruction and climate disaster. Chung was awarded the Sharjah Biennial Artist Prize (2013), named Jane Lombard Fellow for Art & Social Justice at the Vera Record Centre, New College (2018-2020), and honored with the 2020 Asia Arts Video game Changer Awards India by Asia Culture. Her future jobs will be presented at the Dallas Museum of Art and Pennsylvania Academy of the Good Arts Museum.

Tiffany Chung gained an ACC Fellowship in 2015 toward research in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia on internet sites of previous Vietnamese refugee camps.

The Sống Collective was launched 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 confront of a global refugee disaster. The Sống Collective’s mission is to reclaim the Vietnamese American narrative by creating development and functionality prospects for emerging artists of color. We nurture a community of artists whose work explores queries of identity, race, intersectionality, immigration, and the refugee practical experience. We are dedicated to telling stories that dare to subvert preconceptions of Asian People in america.

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 established LayeRhythm Jam, a monthly functionality function that brings dwell musicians to collaborate with street/club dancers. Considering that 2019, the venture has been using its club roots to the stage with The LayeRhythm Experiment company, doing at 92Y, Jacob’s Pillow, Purdue University (on line), Bridge Avenue Theater (on the web), and supplying virtual academic plans for emcees, musicians and dancers. These days Mai Lê is the Govt and Creative Director of LayeRhythm Productions INC, a non-revenue focused to highlighting freestyle voices in general performance art. Mai Lê has been a main dancer in the revolutionary street dance theater firm Rennie Harris PureMovement considering the fact that 2013, and in the rising Passion Fruit dance company since 2016.

Send Chinatown Appreciate is a New York centered, completely volunteer run group, whose target is to present reduction to little, immigrant-owned, Chinatown firms impacted by the results of COVID-19. Considering that the beginning of the pandemic, Chinatowns throughout New York have suffered enormously. Stay at household orders, coupled with a increase in Anti-Asian racism and xenophobia, has meant lessened foot targeted visitors and tourism. At the very same time, most Chinatown firms were being turned down for govt financial loans thanks to software prerequisites inequitable to immigrant operate microbusinesses. Concentrating on cash-only, pen-and-paper organizations that aren’t in a position to use gift card, donation, or application supply methods, Send Chinatown Love facilitates local community assist by creating electronic platforms for corporations in will need so that they may possibly be able to maintain on their own now and in the future. https://www.sendchinatownlove.com/

#Baonanas is a banana pudding feeling based in Jersey Metropolis. Launched by descendants of Filipino immigrants, born and elevated in the country’s most numerous town, #Baonanas celebrates the Philippines’ wealthy culinary flavors. Inspired by and rooted in local community, #Baonanas takes advantage of its platform to share stories of persons who put their heart into whichever they’re baonanas for.