Jingqiu Guan’s Research Choreographs the Invisible Labor of Motherhood
“This project has been cooking in the back of my mind for a long time,” Jingqiu Guan admits. She traces the origins of her award-winning dance research film, “Mama Dancers,” back to her earliest days of motherhood.
Fascinated by her newborn’s gestures, impulsive but also rhythmic and beautiful, Guan filmed fragments of his movements and edited them together into a visual study of motion and connection. More films followed as her family grew, gradually shaping her larger artistic inquiry into motherhood, movement and the body.
“Because I’m a dancer, my interactions with my sons are often shaped by movement,” the assistant professor of the practice of Dance shares. “At home, dancing is a playful part of how we interact with each other. When I move, they imitate me, and when they move, I respond.”
This embodied form of communication between mother and children eventually evolved into her documentary “Mama Dancers,” that explores the lives of dancer-mothers across cultures and disciplines. Armed with little more than cameras and sound equipment, Guan and co-director Yang Tao followed six dancer-mothers from diverse backgrounds: artists trained in Korean traditional forms, Mongolian dance, Martha Graham dance technique, postmodern practice and jazz; some who left major companies after marriage or childbirth, while others carved new paths through choreography or independent work.
The intention was not to create a single narrative of motherhood but to hold multiple, sometimes conflicting, versions of how women navigate professional dance careers alongside pregnancy, caregiving and the invisible labor of family life. And rather than a series of interviews and predetermined conclusions, Guan focused on the subtle choreography of everyday life.
“Not everything needs to be spoken for it to be understood,” Guan explains. “Repetitive gestures, physical proximity and the timing of movement between people often reveal more about care, labor and imbalance than any formal interview could.”
This approach reflects Guan’s larger research philosophy. Instead of separating her artistic practice from her academic inquiry, she sees choreography and filmmaking as forms of investigation that can ask questions through movement, observation and experience.
“My filmmaking is research, but not in the traditional academic sense of beginning with a fixed hypothesis or controlled environment,” she explains. “In dance filmmaking, the process of making becomes the investigation, and as a dancer, I see the body as a site of knowledge and memory.”
Her philosophy carries directly into the intimate moments that shape “Mama Dancers.” Drawing heavily from observation, meanings emerge through sustained attention to everyday life. A dancer pumped breast milk in a costume room between rehearsals. Another navigates long-distance parenting while sustaining her practice. In these moments, Guan gently exposes the structural gaps without overt declaration.
That subtlety is intentional.
“I wasn’t trying to make something loud; I want audiences to arrive at the questions themselves,” she explains. “The result is a group portrait that feels both intimate and expansive, grounded in specific lives but also able to resonate across disciplines and vocations.”
At its heart, “Mama Dancers” is about possibility. It offers visibility to a long-obscured path and shows that a life in dance and motherhood isn’t mutually exclusive — even when the balance is imperfect. “We don’t need to strive for perfection,” Guan shares. “Life is messy, and that messiness offers space for creating one’s own meaning of life.”
For Guan, the film isn’t just about capturing motherhood; it’s about revealing the invisible choreography of labor, care, exhaustion, humanity and devotion that shapes daily life.
Now, when her sons attend her performances, she catches glimpses of that world reflected in their applause, in the ways they imitate her dance poses, even in their careful questions about whether their pointed feet are “good enough” for the stage. In those moments, the boundaries between parent and artist blur, and she finds herself being seen not only as their mother but also as a dancer.
“I obviously want my children to see me as a good mother,” she says, “but I also think it’s important for them to see me as an individual who has dreams and aspirations that I’m still pursuing.”
