Interview with Pat Wong (2016)
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Description
Pat Wong is a dancer and educator. She was a founding member of the Portland Dance Theater and a faculty member in the Dance department at Reed College.
Recorded for the documentary Moving History: Portland Contemporary Dance Past and Present.
Interview Date
2016
Disciplines
Dance
Rights
This interview is made available through the Portland State University Library Special Collections and University Archives with the generous permission of Eric Nordstrom, Portland Performing Arts Video and is for educational and non-commercial use only. It cannot be reproduced in any form, distributed or played for commercial purposes. For more information, please contact Special Collections at Portland State University Library at: specialcollections@pdx.edu or (503) 725-9883
Persistent Identifier
http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/18802
Recommended Citation
Wong, Pat and Nordstrom, Eric, "Interview with Pat Wong (2016)" (2016). Interviews. 1.
http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/18802
Biographical
Pat Wong studied ballet as a teen and returned to dancing as a college student in Vaunda Carter’s modern dance program at Portland State University. With members of her cohort at Portland State, she co-founded the the Portland Dance Theater in the 1970s. Operating collaboratively, the Portland Dance Theater company choreographed and performed original works, toured, and taught dance classes.
Wong taught dance at Portland Community College before joining the faculty at Reed College in 1975, where she taught until her retirement in 2009. She also worked as visiting faculty at Portland State where she taught Minh Tran. Over her years at Reed, she worked to integrate the college’s dance program with the Portland dance community by reaching out to local instructors with teaching opportunities, expanding the dance curriculum while supporting local dance. Wong herself also studied with dance educators who visited Reed from around the country.
Interviewer Eric Nordstrom is a dance performer, filmmaker and professor. As a director and editor, his interests focus on the intersection of dance, improvisation, documentary, and film. His past and current film work features such prominent dancers and scholars as Ann Cooper Albright and Simone Forti. In Seattle, he has performed with Karen Nelson, and in Portland, Oregon, was a core company member with Oslund+Company. Eric has taught contemporary technique, contact improvisation, and dance film courses in colleges and festivals throughout the U.S., including Macalester College, Kenyon College, Reed College, Portland State University, Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation, Conduit Dance, and The Ohio State University, where he earned his Master of Fine Arts. He is on faculty at Lewis and Clark College.