Dana Tai Soon Burgess Gets Personal

metroweekly.com:

An Asian American Dance Journey is “Leaving Pusan.”“It is a representation of my great-grandmother’s emotional and physical journey to leave Korea in 1903,” he says. “She was one of the first 102 Koreans to make it to America, specifically to the plantations of Oahu.

This is a representation of her leaving her community and culture and the life she knew.” His great-grandmother was taken to the sugar cane and pineapple plantations and would work at the Del Monte plantation her whole life.The second piece, “Becoming American,” centers around the true story of a former DTSBDC member Katia Norri, who was adopted by a family in New Jersey when she was three years old.

Norri and her brother were found in a shopping mall in Korea, taken into foster care services, and flown to the United States by Christian services.“It’s really about her struggles as a child to acculturate to her new family in a new country and to try to find resolution in what home would be for her,” Burgess says. “It was interesting talking to her and her adoptive mother about what that process was, because this was in the eighties when there was no specific process for adoption like this.

Norri arrived here speaking only Korean and eating Korean food, so it was quite a journey. There wasn’t the same support system then that there is now.”“Becoming American” premiered in 2011.