University of California Berkeley - Blue and Gold Yearbook (Berkeley, CA)

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ncludes being able to be in a studio with intelligent young bodies ind minds who are willing to experiment with me. My students iren ' t aware that I ' m experimenting, but I try many different approaches to teaching movement, and to getting into whatever a itudent needs to be able to understand liow to perform a particular |:ask. 1 often use IteachingI as an experiment ground. It ' s where I ' ll Tiake a phrase, see if I can turn that into a step. I also like keeping a lulse on what college students are thinking — ' m not that old, but I am quite a bit older than everybody that ' s here — Afhat the mentality is, Afhat do people want iiese days with iiemselves. The more I nteract with students, the nore I realize how mportant dance is to iheir education while Jiey ' re here. Being able to express themselves, to be ahysical. to move to nusic, to train musculariy heir bodies, to take dance seriously as an art form ind as a form of :ommunication, not just a Dastime, is all an mportant part of their education. I like being ible to cultivate what will je tomorrow ' s audience md tomorrow ' s arts matrons. If you ' ve done something, you can jppreciate all the difficulties and intricacies. i you ' ve taken a dance :lass and you know how lard it is to balance on jne leg, when you see somebody balance on poinie and iiold it for 10 seconds without mo ' ing, you think Wow, that ' s amazing. The jiitrained eye would not necessarily see that. The untrained eye ees the high leaps and many, many turns as impressive. The :rained eye sees the in-between steps and understands what that ' s ill about. It looks for a message and something to touch them Features within the dance. If I can impart that idea to just one person out of a class of forty, and they go out into the world and make all their money and become an arts patron, then they will be able to give back in some way. [Teaching is] a physically hard job. When I first started teaching here, I had ten two-hour dance classes a week. Right now I have thiriccn iwo-hour dance classes a week. There ' s a different kind of preparation and a different kind of energy than a lecture class. CH: Do you feel that Berkeley gives adequate support to the arts? SL: I don ' t think that UC Berkeley necessarily, in the eye of the public or the eye of the media, values the arts. 1 think that you and I both know that UC Berkeley is famous for its science, its research, its math, its law, its architecture, and it should be. But, there is another side to Berkeley, and it seems to be downplayed to a certain degree. Nevertheless, the arts are not dead. I think that ' s the important thing, that is to remember that we ' re still here, all these classes are still here, so there is some kind of support. It allows people to be an art major, a dramatic art major, a music major. I wish it were more balanced. The faculty here does a lot of creative activities. A lot of research is creative. Really good research is beyond the box, it ' s thinking outside of the box. In the arts, we think outside of the box every day and all the time. The problem is, it doesn ' t bring in the money, and the money is, in a sense, the bottom line. 1 realize now that in the arts you have to fight and struggle a bit more, because our voice is quiet. ■ Interview conducted by Cynthia Houng I

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SL: Things worked out personally tor nie really well, though its true that a career in the arts is not exactly what Asian parents hope their children fall into. They want that security. My parents, luckily, were always purveyors of the arts. They still, even now, go to the Cantonese opera, and they ' re my best fans. They come see ever thing that I do. So I got lucky in that respect, and 1 think the reason that they and 1 hope I ' m not putting words into their mouth — I think that the reason why they ' re more accepting of what I do is because I work at UC Berkeley also. (Laughs.) I make a good living. A teaching salary is not big, it ' s really not a doctor ' s or lawyer ' s salary. However, the clout of being able to say that I teach at UC Berkeley carries weight, so I think with those two things, they ' re pretty happy with my decision. I ' m fortunate that way. My students who have pressure at home often ask, How did you do that? What We talked about my inspirations for a project that dealt with Asian American issues with a woman-based focus. She was interested, so we made a duet, anil iIkmi we brought in Hileeii Kim. who is the aciniinisirative assistant for Chancellor Mitchell. That ' s her day job, hernot-so-secret life. (Laughs.) fhis is her secret life, dancing with me. Eileen is actually a couple years older than I am. We brought in others, and now we have a nucleus group of seven, as well as two musicians that compose all of our music. Rice Women was our first project under |the name] Facing East Dance and Music. Before that, it was just Sue Li-Iue showing some work. As we went out more and I started to develop more pieces, people started to ask, What shall we call you? What shall we print in the program? 1 realized that I had to have something to call the group. ' We are funded primarily by passionl ' do 1 say to my parents when 1 say 1 want a life in the arts? It ' s not necessarily dance, you know, it ' s graphic design, or painting, or music. It ' s very difficult, because it ' s so individual. You have to work that out yourself. It ' s something that I think as a young adult you need to ask is Do I really want this path, or am I doing this to follow what my parents believe my path should be? Sometimes it works out. and sometimes it doesn ' t, and that ' s the individual part, and that ' s the soul-searching part. CI I: Let ' s talk about your group, Facing Hast. SL: In Facing East, my current group, we always say on our programs that we are funded primarily by passion, and that is very true. It ' s not a lot of money. It ' s a lot of time, a lot of effort and worrying, but it ' s always really worth it because the passion is there. My group is a group of women that have taken the same path that I ' ve taken. In other words, we ' ve all gone to dance school, taken lots of classes, trained extensively, toured or danced for companies and we know what it ' s like to be bound to a very tight schedule where they basically own you. We ' re over that hump. Now we work a regular real job — I probably shouldn ' t say real job. (Laughs.) We ' re working in traditional jobs, making our day jobs, and our spare time we devote to our projects. CM: How did you begin your company. Facing East! SL: I started one dancer at a time. I met Vivian Dai, who was a former UC student, one of my students, and we re-met in a dance class. We were taking the same dance class, and we started talking. She had matured — I ' m at least ten years her senior — and we realized we had a lot of thesame vision. She was tired of trying to make it in dance, yet she really wanted to work on projects that were iniiresiing to her. CH: How did you come up with the name Facing Easfi SL: Facing East was the original name of the first duet that Vivian and I did. It ' s a name that has multiple layers of meaning. For me, it means a time in my life where I respected, maybe for the first time, my Chinese heritage. Of course, I ' ve always been Chinese, but I ' ve also always been American. I was born and raised here. My parents are from China, so 1 literally am first generation, and I became extremely Americanized. 1 speak broken Chinese — 1 understand quite a bit, actually, of Cantonese and Mandarin — but I don ' t speak fluently at all. So, for me, Facing East means looking at my past, looking at China, the roots, and being able to bridge that here, so that geography does not become a barrier between being Chinese and not being Chinese. 1 don ' t feel like 1 have to be in China to feel like I ' m Chinese. There ' s a balance to be had as an Asian and as an American. I know the term Asian-American is thrown out a lot. 1 actually feel like I ' m Asian and American, or Chinese and American, instead of the hyphenated term because 1 feel like I can be both, and that ' s what Rice Women is about. Rice Women deals with more than just Asian American issues, it is accessible because it also deals with mother-daughter issues. Asian Americans read ;c Joy I tick Cliih and said, Yes! Yes! Yes! because it spoke to them on a certain c v . but the book is so popular because it ' s also about mother-tlaughter issues that allowed others to read il and also experience the same recognition. 1 w anted Rice Women to have the same kind of impact. CH: What are some of the pros and consof teaching at Berkeley? What do you hope your students take away from your classes? SL: The pros would be being able to refine my teaching skills, my interi)ersonal ii ' lalion skills, and ni inovcnient ()c ' al)ulai . It

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1 The Beauty ot the Organic T vo paintings hang side by side in Katherine Sherwood ' s office in Kroeber Hall. One painting is representative of Sherwood ' s earlier style, and the other has a more recent genesis. The newer painting has an organic quality, a quality of roughness about its texture and brushwork, whose antecedent can be glimpsed in Sherwood ' s earlier work. This painting is spare and flowing, acrylic paints layered over photolithograhs of Sherwood ' s own cerebral angiograms (x-rays of blood vessels within the brain). These recent paintings, flowing with organic curves and textures, sit at the crux of art and science. Sherwood has taken images that were traditionally considered to be outside the realm of art and appropriated them in her work. Now, magnified a thousandfold, these images dare the viewer to regard them as anything but art. When asked how she decided to incorporate these cerebral angiograms into her art, Sherwood said, I first started using these [angiograms] after my 3 Knock Your Block Off (1998), mixed media on canvas, 96 x 72 inches The curvacious forms trapped in blocks at the lower right hand corner are King Solomon ' s Seals. stroke, which was in May of 1997. 1 had a cerebral hemorrhage, and they performed this procedure (on me]. When the procedure was over, I sat up and saw this beautiful image of the inside of my head, and I was moved to say, ' I have to gel those. I want those. ' She adds, with a laugh, All the doctors and nurses looked at me like I was crazy, and I said, ' But I ' m an artist, I have to get these! ' The spirit that moves Sherwood to create is difficult to describe. It comes from a place that ' s very hard to put into words, she says, pointing to intuition rather than a set process. From art history, 1 draw a lot of inspiration, especially all the work that was done around the first millenium, says Sherwood. The cerebral angiograms are another major source of inspiration. Sherwood points to the moment when she first saw her cerebral angiograms as the catalytic event that propelled her back into the studio. That was the first time 1 had even allowed myself to think as an artist, because before I was just so taken with the fact that 1 had to get well. Sherwood ' s stroke changed more than her focus and subject matter; it also transformed her entire painting process. Prior to her stroke, Sherwood was right-handed. After the stroke, Sherwood taught herself to paint with her left hand. Her left hand, says Sherwood, is more free than her right hand. My recent work also tends to be on a larger scale, she comments. Although Sherwood has used brain imagery in the past, her recent work carries a much more personal meaning, where the cerebral angiograms come to symbolize the concept of art making |as| a life-saving device. , Sherwood ' s painting process begins by laying lu-r canvas on a horizontal surface in her home studio. There is a bed in my house that is too high for me now. 1 converti ' il llial from my bed to my siutlio table. I lay the canvas on the bed and work on it while I sii in a chair with wheels. 1 just circle around [the bed] in my chair After the stroke, Sherwood wanted to detoxify the process, so she switched from oil paints to acrylics, and she finishes the paintings with oils. On these canvases, Sherwood juxtaposes photolithographs of her cerebral angiograms with thick, iw ' islin lines of paint and the occasional Kinj; Solomon ' s Seal. The seals are images culleii horn a ini ' dicval in.uHis( ripl cnlillcd ' Ihc I.emegetan. They have the abiliu I ' : ' 1