PRESS

Credit: TWoods; Kennedy Center’s 10,000 Dreams: A Celebration of Asian Choreography featuring Disha Zhang’s Elapse

Dance Magazine | Gold Standard Arts Foundation Seeks to Foster Community and Collaboration for Asian Creatives | April Deocariza

“I didn’t realize how negatively impactful it would be for me to move to the School of American Ballet at 16 years old and not see anyone who looked like me on the photographs lining the walls,” she says. “At bare minimum, I hope Gold Standard can help other dancers of Asian descent avoid feeling that way.”

- Georgina Pazcoguin

THE TRAILBLAZING POWER OF

CHOO SAN GOH

10,000 Dreams honors a choreographer’s legacy—while building new landscapes for dance.

Learn more

“[Dance Data Project’s] own data shows a 10x increase in Asian choreographers with professional commissions in just the last few years (3 in 2020, up to 34 in 2024, and a large majority to women).

Now that those doors have been opened and we have been given a chance to share what we can do as artists, it’s time to ensure those doors stay open. That there are still opportunities for companies to take a chance on someone who is off-center, not the default. Because that’s where innovation and new exciting art comes from.”

“A lot of the pushback I got was, ‘Well, there’s no one ready. There’s no one who’s a good fit for the company. No one’s on my radar.’ I said, ‘OK, those are legitimate excuses, but let’s get rid of those excuses.’

from the [first 2021] virtual festival… we made five matches between choreographers and ballet companies. Four of them were female artists.”

- Phil Chan

“What began with a mission to update the classical canon — most notably the section of “The Nutcracker” known as “Tea” — has since blossomed into a larger platform celebrating Asian dancers and choreographers.”

“The festival’s content is powerful because it isn’t tangled up in trying to define Asianness for the white gaze. Rather, dance as a form is challenged to prove itself worthy of what each choreographer of Asian descent has to say through their exploration of the human condition.”

In partnership with GSAF and the Commissioned Dreamer Award, TOPAZ Arts announces Joan Dwiartanto as a TOPAZ ARTS 2025-26 AAPI Dance Resident Artist.  

The Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University (CBA), an international research institute for scholars and artists of ballet and its related arts and sciences, announces Phil Chan as a visiting scholar for the 2024-2025 academic year.