I Loved Broadway: Part 2 by Jessica Wu

On Tuesday night, 3 Asian-owned massage parlors in Atlanta were targeted by a 21 year old white man with a gun. 8 people were murdered, 6 of them Asian women. In the hours immediately following, we in the Asian community raised our voices decrying it as a hate crime. And then the Georgia sheriff’s department started issuing statements picked up and amplified by media outlets: “Suspect claims acts were not racially charged”, “Suspect has ‘sex addiction’”, and (unfathomably) “Shooting the result of suspect having a really bad day”.

My Asian community, we are being gaslit. This was a hate crime. Period. It was a hate crime against Asian women and all the fucked up things we represent to that murderer and the trash humans of the world he embodies.

I don’t care if he frequented those establishments. I don’t care that they represented ‘a temptation to him that he had to eliminate’. Mark my words. The systemic and inhuman way in which Asian women are exoticized and fetishized in our media, in our entertainment, and in the perceptions of our friends and neighbors played a huge part in what led this monster to commit his crimes.

The essay below was written several weeks before Tuesday’s horrific shootings and originally slated for release today. I’ve read and reread it over and over wrestling with whether or not it was appropriate to put out there into the world. My own inner conscience reminds me: Silence is complicit.

We have every right to be devastated. We have every right to be angry. We need to feel every ounce of pain and fury and fire. And once we feel it, we need to understand how deeply and dangerously it is ingrained in our realities if we ever hope to change it.

We in the entertainment industry MUST DO BETTER. And if this Asian woman can accept the weight of her role in perpetuating and participating in stereotypes and systems that contributed to the murders of 8 innocent people, then maybe everyone else can too.

“I Loved Broadway: Part 2” by Jessica Wu

I had a jarring moment the other day when I stumbled upon a ‘show pic’ from a decade ago. You know those snapshots: a big group gathered at an opening night performance or backstage celebrating someone’s birthday. I’m in costume (what else, a bikini) and ‘beveling’. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it’s that showgirl-indicating-pose with the front knee slightly bent, weight on the straight back leg, hands on the hips, arched back, tits out.

For some inexplicable reason, this image unsettled me. Spurred by a mounting uneasiness, I waded through my virtual albums. 100th performance. Bevel. Felt cute at a costume fitting. Another bevel. The female ensemble at a bar on tour. More bevels. Onstage post show with a celebrity. Bevel-palooza.

Please understand that it is not my intention to bevel-shame but I am genuinely disturbed. What’s with all the bevels?

Is it because I’ve spent the entirety of my performing career as an ensemble dancer? That has to be it, right? For as long as I can remember, this physical position has been a staple of our musical theatre vernacular. It visually lengthens the leg, accentuates the feminine features. It is the shorthand used when you want to present ‘sexy woman’. I’m hard pressed to think of a dance number or an audition combination I’ve done in my life that didn’t include a bevel.

And I will be the first to acknowledge that I, as a human, exist pretty far from the typical-glamazon-showgirl-fantasy-woman for whom the bevel was first designed. Yet there I am in picture after picture after picture posing like some kind of wannabe pinup. Granted, I’ve played a prostitute—a lot. But I’ve found dozens of images of me doing this damn pose during shows where I played a child. Or a nun. Or a sheepdog.

Thus opened the floodgates of existential inquiry: What does this incessant beveling mean? Who stands like this in everyday life anyway? Do I actually think that this pose makes me appealing? Who am I even trying to be appealing for?

It was sometime around this last thought when my world started to unravel.

It’s summer of 1998. I’m 15 years old and attending a dance workshop in the big city of Saskatoon. The workshop was two days of back-to-back-to-back 90-minute classes in multiple jazz and tap styles and was called ‘Star Power’ or ‘Dance Star’ or something to that effect that I can’t remember. What I do remember though, is learning a contemporary (or ‘lyrical jazz’ as we called it back in the day) combination to “Fortunate” by Maxwell. This was when I knew I wanted to become a professional dancer.

Don’t get me wrong. I was not a great or even very good dancer growing up. I’ve always had technique issues and bad feet and less than stellar flexibility. I was never a shoe-in for medals at regional competitions and I was rejected at a young age by every program that required any sort of admissions audition. If I’m not mistaken, I was originally placed into the ‘recreation’ program (instead of the fancy-pants ‘competition’ program) in my Dolly Dinkle Dance Studio when I was a toddler. To be perfectly honest, I’m not really sure why my parents had me stick with dance for long enough to gain any sort of proficiency except perhaps owing it to the sheer tenacity of immigrants who refused to accept failure—from themselves or their children.

But I digress. Back to “Fortunate”.

Admittedly, this dance combo was probably a little too sexy for 15 year old Jessica to be comfortably dancing. But I had this deep, dark crush on the instructor’s 20 year old son and during this 90-minute awakening accompanied by Maxwell’s dulcet crooning, something clicked for me. I remember, for the first time, dancing for the expressed purpose of getting other people—one cis white male in particular—to watch me. And then by the end of the class when we’d broken into groups to dance ‘full out’, I had gained the eyes of the room and a life-affirming compliment from my teenage obsession. I remember feeling high on the attention. This is the moment I became addicted to performing—and addicted to its validation.

Years would pass and I would continue to grow as a dancer and discover my competence in musical theatre. I would eventually make my way to good old New York City where I’d eagerly bevel my way into dance classes at BDC, auditions at Chelsea Studios, and an industry framed and presided over by white men and their white male gaze.

It’s not a revolutionary statement to say our institution of musical theatre has a long and sordid history of objectifying and minimizing women while simultaneously entrenching men in power. Our musical theatre canon is steeped in misogyny. It is American, after all. I naively counted myself lucky to spend my days in rehearsal rooms and on stages fueled by a singular pervading objective: Get ‘their’ attention.

Get their attention, and you can book this job.

Booking this job is validation, and you need that validation to live—emotionally (because being wanted sure feels good) and physically (because, contrary to popular opinion, a dancer’s still gotta eat).

But no entertainment job lasts forever, right? So you better keep getting the attention of those men behind the table so you can live and pay rent and keep getting their attention!

And the cycle goes round and round. Where the acts of survival end and the dopamine rush of validation begins is messy and our entire entertainment industry plays into our most base human desires, inextricably intertwining the need to be seen and the need to feed, clothe, and shelter ourselves. Throw in the attention-farming platforms of social media, and it’s no wonder we are an industry populated by perfect-presenting yet validation-starved depressives.

Decades into a theatre career, I am forced to wonder: What is it that I actually connect with as a performer? Am I doing the art to uplift humanity or do I just desperately believe I need validation to survive?

I am staring at this pile of bevel pictures and a sensation coalesces in the pit of my stomach. At first it creeps up as a caustic, acidic shame. I feel that shame shift into a heavy sadness. And finally it consumes itself in angry flames.

I’ve spent nearly my entire performing career in theatre perpetuating stereotypes and cliches onstage. Only now am I becoming agonizingly aware of my stereotypical and cliche’d behaviors offstage as well. These are the same behaviors that beg for validation by fulfilling the fantasies of straight white dudes. Behaviors—for me—personified in the bevel.

I’m exhausted. I’m heartbroken. And I’m furious.

What do we see when we stop looking at ourselves through the bifocal lenses of survival and the male gaze?

Let’s find out.

JESSICA WU is an award-winning NYC-based playwright, director, songwriter, dramaturg, and actor-in-a-past-life. Her performance credits include the Broadway Revivals of Miss Saigon and A Chorus Line and she has crossed the US in a half-dozen National Tours, performed at Shakespeare in the Park, Radio City Music Hall, NYC Opera, Lincoln Center, with numerous Regional theatres, and in late-night sketches with Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert. Jessica has written a number of short-films and theatrical works, including two full-length musicals. “You, Me, I, We” has won several development awards (including The National Asian Artists Project’s Discover: New Musicals Series) and was a Finalist for Live & In Color’s Development Retreat, as well as a semi-finalist for The National Alliance of Musical Theatre’s O’Neill Conference. Upcoming is “Poupelle of Chimney Town”, a new-musical based upon the best-selling Japanese picture book of the same name. It is slated to debut in Tokyo, Japan Fall 2021 and the following 2022 season Off-Broadway in NYC. Jessica is an adjunct Theatre Professor at American University, a mentor with the Harvard-Radcliffe G&S Players, and also spent several years in Non-Profit Arts Leadership as an Associate Artistic Director. In 2019, she founded Inspirate Creative Consulting and Development, a practice dedicated to providing clients with purposeful creative coaching and open-hearted, collaborative development sessions for works in-process. www.jessica-wu.com

Sappho ProjectMarch 19, 2021