EveryBody Dances with David Cartahena Lee

EveryBody Dances @ Yale Schwarzman Center brings local and visiting dance artists to our Dance Studio to teach masterclasses in jazz, hip hop, salsa, modern, contemporary, precision dance and more! All community members are welcome. This week's class is led by David Cartahena Lee. 

Movement in this class blends contemporary and street dance vocabularies, drawing from house dance (and its West African roots), street jazz, commercial choreography, and contemporary frameworks. Class begins with community-building exercises rooting then class in connection, followed by grooving, bouncing, and rocking through house foundations and contemporary phrasing, culminating in learning an excerpt from Risky Business that explores assimilation through multiple perspectives. 

This class draws from David Cartahena Lee’s work with Samaw Dance and its presentation of Resonance, an AAPI+ dance event exploring identity, community, and belonging. Rooted in David’s perspective as a multi-generational Asian American (fourth-generation Chinese American and third-generation Filipino American through Hawai’i) this class examines how our lived experiences shape how we move through the world. 

Through guided discussion and movement, participants will explore excerpts from David’s work Risky Business, which investigates assimilation and the pressure to conform to societal expectations. The class considers questions such as: What does assimilation feel like from the inside? What does it look like from the outside? How do we navigate moments when self-expression and conformity collide?