By: Jason Vu

The DAPpers class is a sanctuary, a place to remember your inherent compassion, a celebration of the vastness of our bodies. My name is Jason Vu. I am a dance artist and facilitator of healing experiences through embodied practices. Simply put, I have dedicated my life to “Dance as an Alternative Form of Healing”, which was a personally developed concentration I had tailored with the department of Health and Human Biology at Brown University. My journey with DAPpers began in 2015, and even after graduating in 2017, my aspirations and creative modalities are still deeply informed and inspired by the practices I’ve witnessed there. As professional dancers, we are often taught the limits of our bodies—that the foot must point, the leg must be high, every turn must be a seamless display of control between the way you position your foot to the way your eyes take you where you need to go. DAPpers don’t succeed in these confines, but they have shown me a freedom I could never fathom.

I’ve had the pleasure of witnessing DAPpers dance both in class and on stage at the ASaP symposiums. There is nothing like the tangible pleasure and strength that reverberates through the room when you see them move. It has convinced me that the self-realization of freedom, expressed in a body that longs for it, is enough of a performance to move any audience to tears. As an able-bodied, young dancer, I made this film with Isabel Chin to encapsulate those moments of breaking free. Why does sitting in a chair—or having your body confined in any particular way, have to be reason for paralysis? Why can’t those limitations be the very reason you desire to be in your body? Imagination is a funny thing. Really, it can happen anywhere because it begins small. It breathes and grows and before you know it, it has picked up and put together pieces of you that you had forgotten, even from years long ago. I’m young. I can only imagine what comes up for DAPpers. Movement is healing because it is an extension of our bodies in connection to imagination. And imagination needs to start at a beginning. DAPpers is that beginning, for me and for anyone else that opens their heart to it.

I’m now pursuing an MFA in Choreography, wanting to share these types of profound healing experiences I have had with the DAPpers. The freedom I see in them is the very essence I seek in my choreography and the classes I teach. Dance was never about upholding standards of beauty—after all, those are all linked to ideas of racism, queerphobia, and ableism. What the DAPpers know that many others seem to have forgotten, is that dance is that vehicle to choreograph futures of embodied resilience, love, and liberation.