Swivel Me This! How Jason Hsu Built Switch Taipei One Swivel at a Time

This week we’re joined by Jason Hsu (he/him), Lindy Hop dancer, educator, researcher, tour guide, and founder of Switch Taipei - a dance school for Queer equality and identity in Swing in Taipei Taiwan! With a background in theatre, language education, and cross-cultural pedagogy, Jason teaches and performs Lindy Hop but also bridges dance practice and academia. After completing a master’s degree in the Anthropology of Dance, he is now pursuing a Ph.D. in Dance at Taipei National University of the Arts, researching cross-cultural movement in Lindy Hop through queer identity and exploring how those ideas can reshape dance symbolically, and in real time.In this episode, we talk about switch dancing, gender expression and how Jason’s journey has been anything but linear, the importance of dancing both roles, and how switching can create opportunities for visibility, authenticity, and more expansive expressions of gender. We also get into gender equity, oppression, Jazz as a liberatory art form, Jason’s Taiwanese identity as a partner dancer,l the way identity can have so many bodily and experiential overlaps. And maybe the best part: the important role that fashion plays in self-expression.Join us for a conversation about dance, identity, culture, and disrupting the norms that tell us who we should be so we can be a lot more who we really are!