Co-conceived by choreographer Jingqiu Guan (Associate Professor of the Practice in Dance) and dramaturg Eileen Chow (Associate Professor of the Practice in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies), Rail-Tracks is an immersive multimedia dance theater project that integrates dance, literature, storytelling, historical research, and visual media. Drawing on archival materials, personal memories, and embodied storytelling, the work traces connections between the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, Asian diasporic migration, and wartime displacement in the American West, South, and beyond. Through cinematic music and projection, the performance invites audiences onto a “train ride,” where each stop is an encounter with a personal narrative embedded within larger political and cultural histories.
A work-in-progress version with Duke student dancers was premiered at Highways Performance Space in Los Angeles in May 2025. An updated work-in-progress version was presented in May 2026 through the Trillium Arts NC Choreographic Fellowship.
“All great train stations are monuments to the most personal rites of passage and huge historic events—every form of leave-taking and arrival. Mass human displacements, waves of immigration, war, forced migration. Exile, dispossession, exodus, deportation. And for the fortunate, the [train] station was a place of extraordinary, impossible reunions."
- Anne Michaels and John Berger, Railtracks (2012)
Love can be that fragile, in its earliest stages. Love can be the train you miss by less than a minute.
- Michael Cunningham
The world is beginning to move past me like the banks of a hedge when the train starts, like the waves of the sea when a steamer moves.
- Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931)
Choreographer: J.J. Guan
Producer & Dramaturg: Eileen Chow
Dancers: Amare Sweric, Rongna Su, Maggie Xiao, Yinqi Wang, Sadé Jones
Dancers in Previous Versions: Shelly Han, Natalia Cervantes, Indigo Cooks
Multimedia Design: Todd Winkler & J.J. Guan
Composer: Karam Salem
Costume Design: Maggie Xiao
Photos and Videos: Sean Zhou