My practice is an excavation, a search for women’s voices, those reverberating in other heads, expelled through other throats as well as my own. I seek the lived truth versus what is taught, demanded, culturally expected and in some instances still required for acceptance in a patriarchal universe.
As a playwright I focus on exploding canonical, patriarchal stories about women, especially over 50, retelling them from the perspective of the women themselves. I see plays in shapes. Women generally do not, cannot, live in undulating waves or discuss life, loves or crises in conversations or arguments plotted on pyramids. We live and speak in circles, spins, inversions, funnels, webs, weaves and flashes. Exploring these, I find the trajectory of my plays. A musician in youth, lyricism and rhythm often laces my text. Combined with aural, visual and textural elements that play critical storytelling roles, I strive to provoke internal and external questions, discussions and realizations.
Solo writing is performative and hybrid, incorporating elements of poetry, prose and scripted dialogue as well as audio, video and visual elements to fit the journey of the piece. My actress and performer brain compels me to push the limits of text to perform on the page using physical shape and space. All are rooted in feminist earth, explorations of self-ventriloquism – the dualities, multiplicities and unexplained spaces underneath thick and thin layers of personal paint that don’t peel easily. Discoveries are made, but answers are illusory, always provoking questions. Finished works are meant to have multiple lives – on the page, in performance and as installations.
Currently I am interested in performance art that lives in the interstitial space between a script and score, a theatre and gallery, an empty space that draws breath from the written word and simple gesture growing into being in collaboration.
I make myself uncomfortable in this work. If you never go out on a limb, you always have an obstructed view.
Much love and thanks to my collaborators for Eve’s Ribs, Lilith’s Lungs: Evolene Zhang, Dongyun Liu, Elizabeth Flood and Jack Steele.
Collaborators:
Elizabeth Flood, sound design shortwave radio meadow listening
Dongyun Liu, performer, costume design
Jack Steele, music composer
Xiaohua Zhang (Evolene), painter
