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“If the System Isn’t Right, Why Can’t We Change It? An Interview with Danny Yung” is from the Document(s) series, a library of commentary on people and issues in the dance field. This repository of essays includes interviews by writers and thinkers on dance, as well as “dance discursions,” which offer opportunities for reflection on the field of dance commissioned by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
Writer and arts specialist Suzanne Carbonneau conducted a public discussion with Danny Yung, artistic director of Zuni Icosahedron from Hong Kong, on the occasion of the “Reinterpreting Tradition” series presented during the 2010 FringeArts Festival. This interview was organized by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage on September 18, 2010.
From the interview:
Suzanne Carbonneau: “I first heard Danny Yung give a presentation in Tokyo in 2003, and remember having a conversation with Bill Bissell afterwards in which we said we need Danny’s vision in the United States. It was a very dim time for us in the United States, having watched our country’s response to September 11, which was to become aggressive against the world. Many of us had a feeling that our voices didn’t matter—that our [U.S.] government was going to do what it wanted to do despite anything we felt. And so I found Danny’s uplift remarkably sustaining at that moment. His notion that cultural policy is not something that comes from the top down, but is something artists should be creating from the ground up was particularly relevant. He was seeing artists as agents for change.”
