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“What happened in my high school experience was a very important moment for me to change my mind about what new immigrants can do to change our lives, change our community,” Chen said.
Going to school in fear
When they arrived in this country, Tong and Chen landed in the peculiar institution of the American neighborhood urban high school, where the most vulnerable children often are concentrated together and then denied what they need to thrive. New immigrants from all over the world interact with students from marginalized groups who have their own history of oppression. At the time of the attacks, Southern had a student body of more than 800 students, which was two-thirds Black and nearly a quarter Asian, with a small but growing Latino population and a handful of white students.
Joan Myers Brown’s company of dancers were midway through a European tour when the pandemic struck.
“It was a 15-city tour but after the fifth performance, I knew we had to get home before the borders closed,” Myers Brown said. “But I still had to pay the dancers for the whole tour.”
The coronavirus-related economic impact on the arts community has been life altering.
For Myers Brown, founder and artistic advisor of the Philadelphia Dance Company (PhilaDanco!), it meant keeping performers on the payroll (the dancers are paid a yearly salary), while adapting to a new norm of pirouettes gone virtual.