Heritage Not Hidden: The Performances of Multiracial American Dancer Sono Osato

The Japanese-Irish ballet dancer and Broadway performer, Sono Osato, was no stranger to marginalization and misunderstanding due to her mixed-race status. Osato is often heralded as the first dancer of Japanese descent and the youngest to join the Ballet Russe in 1934. Yet, even at the age of 14, Osato demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of mixed-Asian identity curated through a series of racialized performative events. My paper focuses on Osato’s complicated journey through race and performance from her unlikely theatrical appearance for Joseph Goebbels, who “applauded energetically from his shoeshine box” in Berlin, to her Broadway debut as the “All-American” Ivy Turnstiles in Jerome Robbins’ On the Town (1944); the latter became a number one musical hit during World War II and made Osato the first mixed-race Asian actor to appear on a Broadway stage. Osato, whose father was interned and whose brother was in the 442^nd RCT, contended that her “heritage had never been hidden.” How then was she able to appear as a mixed-Asian subject in a political and cultural landscape often hostile to those of Asian descent? Through Osato’s shape shifting theatrical appearances, she affirmed her mixedness within the performative practices of each event and redefined the complexities of Asian American identity and representation. This paper considers the ways in which the generative space-time of performance interrupts larger expectations of race and elucidates its usefulness in revisioning a more inclusive and expansive Asian/America.