Year: 2025-2026
DanceForce Member: Paz Tanjuaquio
Artists: Joan Dwiartanto; Yin Mei; Marie Lloyd Paspe; Barkha Patel; Nami Yamamoto; Shannon Yu
Community Partner: Gold Standard Arts Foundation; Topaz Arts
Audience: 650
County: Queens
TOPAZ ARTS 2025-26 AAPI Dance Residencies celebrates dance artists of Asian American and Pacific Islanders heritage, giving choreographers the opportunity and freedom to create in a focused and inspired atmosphere. Engaging artists and the community, this project raises awareness, empowering voices through artists’ stories, their bodies and lived experiences. Supporting AAPI dance artists with time and space to focus and develop the creation of new works, each choreographer received fully subsidized rehearsal space and artist stipend.
The following artists participated in creative residencies at TOPAZ ARTS from 7/1/25 to 6/30/26: Yin Mei, Marie Lloyd Paspe, Barkha Patel, Nami Yamamoto, Shannon Yu, and Joan Dwiartanto (in partnership with Gold Standard Arts Foundation).
Showings were held at TOPAZ ARTS:
June 20, 2026: barkha patel shared a new work “icchā / desire” a new interdisciplinary solo kathak work weaving original music, set design, and garba. The work confronts the body as a site of ancestral history, creating space within it to welcome unnamed matriarchs to breathe again.
March 21, 2026: Future Memory, a new project by Nami Yamamoto performed with Johanna S. Meyer, Sarah White-Ayón, and Mutsuyo Omatsu Isaacs, is a work-in-progress that continues to evolve as an embodied reflection on how memory, dream, hope, tragedy, and loneliness move through time and the body.
Sept. 30, 2025: Shannon Yu worked on two projects during the residency, a duet “With” with dancer Sarah Zucchero – a piece that came from an outburst of emotion transitions within oneself, creating shifting dynamics that captures the audiences; and “…all knowing 瞭然” – a solo exploring the transitional state between past and future, holding a magnifying glass to herself, inviting audiences to witness the intricacies of her being – the flaws, the brilliance, the humanity – reflecting on New York, Taiwan, queerness, displacement, and, ultimately, you.
Space Residencies with showings at other locations:
Joan Dwiartanto, in residence at TOPAZ ARTS during Fall/Winter 2025, a Gold Standard Arts Foundation Commission Dreamer Awardee, continued new work in dance and film, with a new dancefilm to be screened in 2026.
Yin Mei, a dancer, choreographer, and educator known for creating work that bridges cultural divides, created new work with dancers Ching-I Chang, Marie Lloyd Paspe – Half the Sky, a dance and visual work rooted in the language of the body, responding to enduring mythologies surrounding women across generations, presented at Asia Society on Jan. 10, 2026.
Marie Lloyd Paspe, a Filipina-American dance and vocal performer, choreographer, director, educator, continued developing her evening-length work Stone Belly, with a showing at LMCC Open Studios at Governors Island in May 2026.
