MPI Participants - Peggy Choy

Peggy Choy, MA/MS
Associate lecturer, dance program
Outreach coordinator, Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Biography

Peggy Myo-Young Choy is a choreographer/dancer/educator who has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Dance Program since 1993. She received the 2002 Wisconsin Dance Council Award for Choreography and Performance. She is director and producer of the “First Asian Contemporary Performing Arts Festival 2003: Focus Korea and Indonesia” in Madison, Wisconsin.

Seung Hwa: Rape/Race/Rage/Revolution, a solo piece with three musicians commissioned by Cornell University, and presented at New York’s Dance Theater Workshop (1995). Ki-Aché: Stories From the Belly (1997), a work about Asian/African and Asian/African American women, was commissioned by the Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church (NY).

Her recent work “Night Bombing” (2002)--funded by the Media, Performance and Identity Research Circle, International Institute/Ford Foundation--is a multimedia work originally created in collaboration with film artists Doug Rosenberg, Shauheen Soofi, and dancer Jessica Gaspar. Choy received a commission from Princeton University for "Pemangku," with composer Nicholas Brooke, and an Atlantic Center for the Arts/NEA grant to collaborate with Fred Ho.

She has collaborated with writer/director Putu Wijaya and has choreographed for his productions (“Geez!” and “Roar!”) which premiered at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at New York’s LaMama theater. In 1994, she received the Woman of Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Women of Color Network.

Her latest work, Passage of Oracles—a tribute to the journeys Asian and African ancestors to and within this country--has performed in 2000 through 2004 in the Midwest, and will be the keynote performance of the American Minority Student Leadership Conference in October 2004.

She teaches Javanese Dance and Asian American Movement, in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Dance Program. She is also Outreach Specialist at the UW-Madison Center for Southeast Asian Studies, setting up yearly teachers workshops on performance and Southeast Asian Studies. She has conducted research on dance and the media in Korea, funded by the Media, Performance and Identity Research Circle, International Institute/Ford Foundation (2002). She was instrumental in building Korean studies on the campus, and will teach Korean dance beginning in the summer of 2005 made by possible by funds from the U.S. Department of Education and the Center for East Asian Studies.

Choy holds an M.A. from the University of Michigan in Southeast Asian Studies and a M.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Urban and Regional Planning. She received a 2004 Chancellor’s Award from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to earn an M.F.A. in the Dance Program.

Additional information

For more information about Peggy Choy, view a brochure about "The Ki Project." (PDF best viewed with facing pages on; download free Adobe Acrobat Reader)

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Themes
Deterritorialization of Culture | Cultural Translation
Meaning Production | Local Uses of Global Media
Discourses of Control | Contexts of Expression
Modes of Expression

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