Bradford Chin
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Bradford Chin | Artist in Residence 2024 | Photo Credit: Gregory R.R. Crosby / Lost Heart Productions
Bradford, an Asian man, is pictured from the chest and up against an expansive, white background. He looks toward the camera with a quietly serious face, his lips closed in the middle of his black facial hair. His thick, wavy, coarse black hair is parted slightly off-center and rests about two inches above his ears, emphasized by a very short undercut. He wears a pale light blue, denim-looking button-down shirt with a banded collar that accentuates the verticality of his neck growing away from his slim shoulders.
In Bradford Chin’s words, “The power of collaboration expands the horizons of our storytelling. Every individual embodies a uniquely lived life, lending different perspectives to a shared experience or process.” This sentiment drives his work as an artist, activist, collaborator, and community member.
Bradford creates collaborative activist dance-based works that seek to shine light on the margins and envision the future. In seeking to center disability and propose new aesthetic paradigms, his work follows in the spirit of pioneers such as W.E.B. DuBois, Gloria Anzaldua, Judith Heumann, Patty Berne, and Ellice Patterson.
While traditional methods of performance and audience accessibility are often divorced from the creative process and positioned as a barrier to overcome, Bradford’s work centers disability and accessibility so that we may better understand how disability is conceptualized and positioned in dance and performance.
The Project
With support from HCL, Bradford Chin, will be exploring the use of Audio Description (“AD”) as the primary generative device in creating and presenting a dance work. Using text-based, non-body-specific movement instructions (“descriptors”) to construct the choreographic arc and the narrative and emotional landscape of the performance, Bradford will facilitate efforts toward a Disability Justice politic.
A narrative audio track that incorporates AD into its storytelling will precede, dictate, and develop alongside the movement generation process. This creative approach to developing a new dance work strives towards greater accessibility as well as power sharing in the traditional choreographer-dancer dynamic. Furthermore, this process centers disability in dance such that we may begin to better understand how disability itself is conceptualized and impacts the way we each navigate through the world.
Through consulting with audio describers, and blind and low-vision colleagues in the arts, Bradford will integrate the experiences of others with his own experiences as a disabled artist in order to center those who are most impacted by absence, presence, and nature of AD and to realize the capacity to create because of, not despite, disability.
David Bernal-Fuentes, Spencer Brown, Laura Cubanski, Taylor Grandy, Vanessa Hernández Cruz, Oriana Kou, Isabella Lara, Jessica Lopez Hernandez, Amanda Martz, and Beatrice White in The world was ending, so they danced, and they were free (2023), directed by Bradford Chin. Lighting design by Jimmy Balistreri; costume design by Kaylynn Sutton; set design by Bradford Chin.
Image Description: On a darkened stage, eight dancers bottleneck in a thin pathway of light that leads to a dim, fiery red portal blocked by a chain link fence. Six of the dancers grasp at each other in counterbalances while Vanessa collapses over her rollator walker with David slowly pacing around her. Outside the lit pathway, another dancer stands with her foot on the motionless body of a tenth dancer laying at her feet. All of the dancers wear shapeless brown coverings that obscure their bodies and their colorful, patterned tunics.
Caitlyn Cargnoni, Ashton Craven, Amanda Martz, Emma Mertens, Elizabeth Sah, Coral Scialpi, Alexa Wade, and Alicia Young in Sunrise: A case study in movement scores and Disability Justice (2022), directed by Bradford Chin. Lighting design by Jimmy Balistreri; costume design by Natalie Oga.
Image Description: Eight dancers are photographed in various states of arcing, jumping, traveling, swiping, and reaching in front of a bright, elegant purple-lit background. In a loose clump, their levels loosely range from highest level (jumping, most upright) on the left to lower level on the right. The eight women wear white-colored costumes of fitted tops and flowing bottoms along with white face masks.
Photo Credit: Skye Schmidt
About the Artist
Bradford Chin is a dance artist and methodologist, DEIJ and accessibility consultant, and audio describer for dance who explores disability as a generative experience in creating and presenting dance works. A recipient of the 2021-2022 California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship, his works have been described by LA Dance Chronicle as “conceptually fun.” Formerly a company member with AXIS Dance Company, Bradford has taught contemporary modern, ballet, improvisation, and composition techniques across the United States and internationally. He has also taught independently as well as through organizations such as The Wooden Floor and Young Choreographers Project LA. Bradford earned an MFA in Dance from the University of California, Irvine and a BFA in Dance from California State University, Long Beach. He currently serves on the Advisory Council for the National Dance Education Organization (NDEO).
For more information, visit BradfordChin.com
