Biography
Jonathan "JayWAN" Pattiwael is an Indonesian-American dancer, teacher, and choreographer from the global Hip-Hop civilization—a bohemian adventurer in love with the pursuit of knowledge through movement. JayWAN embodies a wellspring of knowledge in motion, weaving an ancestral tapestry at once ephemeral and eternal. Their artistic destiny is rooted in a celebrated Indonesian lineage; the Pattiwael name is synonymous with performance artistry, with their grandfather a revered ballet master and their aunt a national prima. This inheritance forms the foundation of a journey that unfolded across the urban landscapes of Indonesia, moving through cities like Banjarmasin, Makassar, and Semarang before settling in Jakarta. It was in that sprawling metropolis that they discovered the raw, expressive power of Hip-Hop, a cultural language whose rhythmic, groove-based knowledge resonated deeply with the Sundanese traditions of their heritage.
JayWAN's artistic research navigates the intersection of Hip-Hop/House dance culture and contemporary concert dance. Their practice, rooted in the marginalized Black and Latin Queer communities that birthed these forms, investigates how embodied knowledge shapes identity and community. Through a methodology of "remixing" breaking, house, and indigenous dances with contemporary forms, their work challenges canonical boundaries and creates new frameworks for understanding the immigrant experience and the social body.
As the director of Organi City, JayWAN has developed a distinct artistic philosophy that emerged through their practice—one that treats performance as physical excavation and emotional endurance. Their work investigates the architecture of the unspoken, where the "void" becomes a space for what cannot be uttered, and "mournings" pluralize to encompass the layered griefs of relationships, identities, and shared realities lost. In pieces like "a void of mournings"—presented at international venues from Finland's FinFringe Festival to the Fayetteville Movement Festival—JayWAN employs sand as a co-performer and living archive, recording the traces of movement much like memory preserves the echoes of experience. Their approach transforms the performance space into a ritual ground where confession, intimacy, and the weight of care become physically manifest through athletic duets, breathy tantrums, and the stark evidence of bodies moving through granular landscapes.
This philosophical framework, while resonating with the traditions of Pina Bausch's Tanztheater and Allan Kaprow's Happenings, remains fundamentally emergent from JayWAN's own transcultural negotiation. They are a master in turning potential creative trainwrecks into dynamic ecosystems that engage abstract and narrative encounters between the physical body and the emergent themes of marginalized peoples. Their work has been presented across more than a dozen countries and numerous prestigious venues, including the Festival Entrelaçados in Portugal, b12 Festival in Berlin, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, and the Texas Woman's University Department of Dance.
As an educator and tradition bearer, JayWAN’s work extends into the academy as a vital practice of somatic historiography. In their role as an Assistant Professor of Dance, they bear AfroAesthetic traditions, guiding students to define their identities by developing strategies to integrate themselves into a larger social world. Their teaching, a direct extension of their core philosophy, posits that the body in motion is a body thinking. They masterfully tap into the raw, innate body through a polyrhythmic, kinesthetic awareness, revealing the embodied scripts inscribed in our spaces, experiences, and physical memory. In workshops from "Postmodern Breaking" to "Groove as a Somatic Practice," they create an environment where these non-verbal, visual, and aural stories—the stories only the body can tell—are honored as vital ways of knowing and world-making.
JayWAN remains a dedicated community leader and active street dancer. They are a co-founder of Heroes Rise Street Dance Academy, an organization dedicated to preserving and promoting Black Vernacular dance, and host "Enter the Cypher" in Austin, a jam series that applies hip-hop's community-building principles to support unhoused artists. You can still catch them in a cypher at hip-hop jams or competing in high-level battles, ensuring their teaching remains a living, breathing practice.
JayWAN ultimately serves as a vital synthesizer: bridging the Pattiwael artistic legacy with the cypher, the groove of West Java with the pulse of the hip-hop nation, and the theoretical frameworks of the university with the embodied knowledge of the street. Through their work across Hip-Hop, street dance, contemporary, contact improvisation, and theatre communities, they continue to create performances that challenge cultural forces and initiate social action, tirelessly working to deepen our understanding of humanity through the kinetic language of movement.
Recently, JayWAN has maintained a rigorous international touring schedule, completing summer European tours from 2023 through 2025. A highlight of this period was their 22-minute solo at the Festival Entrelaçados in Portugal, where they were recognized among the top eight emerging choreographers. This sustained global presence, coupled with their continued competition in events like the Gathering in Seattle and the Bashville Stampede, solidifies their unique position as a street dancer and scholar whose pedagogy is directly informed by active, international practice.
JayWAN’s choreographies and performances have been commissioned and presented by a wide spectrum of national and international venues, including the FinFringe Festival (Finland), Festival Entrelaçados (Portugal), b12 Festival (Germany), IUGTE Conference (Austria), the Cleveland Dance Festival, Fayetteville Movement Festival, REST Fest by the Theorists, the Ohio Dance Festival, Texas Woman’s University, KH FRESH Festival (San Francisco), Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Heroes Rise Street Dance Academy, Tesla’s SpaceX Station, and the Contemporary at Laguna Gloria, among others.
Master of Fine Arts in Dance - Texas Woman's University
Bachelor of Science in Geographic Information Science - Texas State University
Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance Performance and Choreography - Texas State University
JayWAN's artistic research navigates the intersection of Hip-Hop/House dance culture and contemporary concert dance. Their practice, rooted in the marginalized Black and Latin Queer communities that birthed these forms, investigates how embodied knowledge shapes identity and community. Through a methodology of "remixing" breaking, house, and indigenous dances with contemporary forms, their work challenges canonical boundaries and creates new frameworks for understanding the immigrant experience and the social body.
As the director of Organi City, JayWAN has developed a distinct artistic philosophy that emerged through their practice—one that treats performance as physical excavation and emotional endurance. Their work investigates the architecture of the unspoken, where the "void" becomes a space for what cannot be uttered, and "mournings" pluralize to encompass the layered griefs of relationships, identities, and shared realities lost. In pieces like "a void of mournings"—presented at international venues from Finland's FinFringe Festival to the Fayetteville Movement Festival—JayWAN employs sand as a co-performer and living archive, recording the traces of movement much like memory preserves the echoes of experience. Their approach transforms the performance space into a ritual ground where confession, intimacy, and the weight of care become physically manifest through athletic duets, breathy tantrums, and the stark evidence of bodies moving through granular landscapes.
This philosophical framework, while resonating with the traditions of Pina Bausch's Tanztheater and Allan Kaprow's Happenings, remains fundamentally emergent from JayWAN's own transcultural negotiation. They are a master in turning potential creative trainwrecks into dynamic ecosystems that engage abstract and narrative encounters between the physical body and the emergent themes of marginalized peoples. Their work has been presented across more than a dozen countries and numerous prestigious venues, including the Festival Entrelaçados in Portugal, b12 Festival in Berlin, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, and the Texas Woman's University Department of Dance.
As an educator and tradition bearer, JayWAN’s work extends into the academy as a vital practice of somatic historiography. In their role as an Assistant Professor of Dance, they bear AfroAesthetic traditions, guiding students to define their identities by developing strategies to integrate themselves into a larger social world. Their teaching, a direct extension of their core philosophy, posits that the body in motion is a body thinking. They masterfully tap into the raw, innate body through a polyrhythmic, kinesthetic awareness, revealing the embodied scripts inscribed in our spaces, experiences, and physical memory. In workshops from "Postmodern Breaking" to "Groove as a Somatic Practice," they create an environment where these non-verbal, visual, and aural stories—the stories only the body can tell—are honored as vital ways of knowing and world-making.
JayWAN remains a dedicated community leader and active street dancer. They are a co-founder of Heroes Rise Street Dance Academy, an organization dedicated to preserving and promoting Black Vernacular dance, and host "Enter the Cypher" in Austin, a jam series that applies hip-hop's community-building principles to support unhoused artists. You can still catch them in a cypher at hip-hop jams or competing in high-level battles, ensuring their teaching remains a living, breathing practice.
JayWAN ultimately serves as a vital synthesizer: bridging the Pattiwael artistic legacy with the cypher, the groove of West Java with the pulse of the hip-hop nation, and the theoretical frameworks of the university with the embodied knowledge of the street. Through their work across Hip-Hop, street dance, contemporary, contact improvisation, and theatre communities, they continue to create performances that challenge cultural forces and initiate social action, tirelessly working to deepen our understanding of humanity through the kinetic language of movement.
Recently, JayWAN has maintained a rigorous international touring schedule, completing summer European tours from 2023 through 2025. A highlight of this period was their 22-minute solo at the Festival Entrelaçados in Portugal, where they were recognized among the top eight emerging choreographers. This sustained global presence, coupled with their continued competition in events like the Gathering in Seattle and the Bashville Stampede, solidifies their unique position as a street dancer and scholar whose pedagogy is directly informed by active, international practice.
JayWAN’s choreographies and performances have been commissioned and presented by a wide spectrum of national and international venues, including the FinFringe Festival (Finland), Festival Entrelaçados (Portugal), b12 Festival (Germany), IUGTE Conference (Austria), the Cleveland Dance Festival, Fayetteville Movement Festival, REST Fest by the Theorists, the Ohio Dance Festival, Texas Woman’s University, KH FRESH Festival (San Francisco), Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Heroes Rise Street Dance Academy, Tesla’s SpaceX Station, and the Contemporary at Laguna Gloria, among others.
Master of Fine Arts in Dance - Texas Woman's University
Bachelor of Science in Geographic Information Science - Texas State University
Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance Performance and Choreography - Texas State University
Research Interests
JayWAN’s work imagines a hybrid approach between choreographic practice as a source of performative social interactions and the theatrical arts as a medium for social change. As a bicultural Indonesian American artist who lives in two different dance aesthetic worlds (Hip-Hop culture and Contemporary Dance). JayWAN is interested in investigating the human condition by playfully instigating dances, gestures, authenticity, absurdity, characters, relationships, emotions, menial tasks and original voices to create interdisciplinary performances that help us better understand the human condition.
Teaching Interests
JayWAN is a teacher-healer in multiple levels of dance disciplines: breaking, rocking, hip-hop, house, contemporary dance, contact improvisation choreography, conditioning, freestyle/improvisation, floorwork, performance, pencak silat, Tahiti Ori, Hula, and traditional Indonesian dance. They are well-versed to teach theory courses like experiential anatomy, contemporary issues, dance history, dance pedagogy, world dance, dance and globalization, American popular dance, producing dance in the professional realm and writing for dance.