Under the Radar

Artistic Direction by Claudine Naganuma

Edited by Solitaire Miguel

Dancers: Miriam Ching Louie. Malkia Chionesu, Mana Hayakawa, Carolyn Choy, Joan Tarika Lewis, Janey Madamba

Sound Composition Joel Davel and Violinist Joan Tarika Lewis

Under the Radar was inspired by an interview conducted with Miriam Ching Yoon Louie. As part of the PEACE Project (created in 2009) Claudine Naganuma has been collecting the personal stories of people living with Parkinson's disease. Her inquiry has centered around people's experiences around how the disease has affected their identities and their lives. How can one find peace while living with this debilitating disease? Culling the wisdom gained through the experience of living with Parkinson's disease, the PEACE Project seeks to cull and disseminate the wealth of information that this community has to share with each other and with the medical and scientific community.

As mentioned in this video, if you are of the Asian diaspora and want culturally specific support with your Parkinson's disease, consider speaking with someone at Asian Health Services located in Oakland Chinatown. You can visit them at AsianHealthServices.org or call the administrative offices at: 510-735-3100. 

For those interested in attending Dance for PD®, Oakland classes please register for class. Dance for PD®, Oakland classes are held in person on Saturdays and virtually on Thursdays. For more information visit our Dance for PD® page(add link to that page). Dance for PD® is supported in part by the Parkinson's Foundation and generous Individual donors. All classes are free. To support our Dance for PD® classes please donate here.

For information about Asian Health Services visit this link.

Miriam Ching Yoon Louie is a third generation Korean Chinese American writer and activist. She co-founded the Women of Color Resource Center with Linda Burnham and served as the media coordinator for women worker organizations Asian Immigrant Women Advocates and Fuerza Unida. She is the author of Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers Take on the Global Factory (2001) and co-author of BRIDGE: Building a Race & Immigration Dialogue in the Global Economy (with Cho, Argüelles Paz y Puente & Khokha, 2004) and of Women's Education in the Global Economy (2000).

Louie’s first novel, Not Contagious—Only Cancer (2016), was published by Rabbit Roar, an Asian radical womanist press, launched with Nguyen Louie, her daughter, illustrator and co-publisher. Louie co-wrote XicKorea: Poems, Rants, Words Together (with Beth Ching and Arnoldo García, 2002) and Ranting Tiger, Thundering Bunny (with Nguyen Louie, 2012). Her articles have been carried in such publications as The Nation, Ms. Magazine, Amerasia and East Bay Express, and in such anthologies as All the Women in My Family Sing and Asian Americans: The Movement & the Moment. Louie has drummed with Jamae Sori/ Sister Sound, Korean Youth Cultural Center and Ieumsae.

Trickster Parkinson’s knocked Louie down in 2019 while she was working on her second novel Mosquito Road. Add chronic pain from nerve damage and she walks a path as twisty as scoliosis climbing a mountain’s spine.

This dance was supported by the East Bay Fund for Artists, a program of the East Bay Community Foundation