I’m honored to have been chosen as one of 3Girls Theatre Company’s resident Innovators.  Based in San Francisco, 3Girls Theatre Company develops, produces and promotes new plays by women playwrights; their Innovators Series builds bridges between technological and artistic innovators in the city.  As one of their Innovators, I will present an in-process showing of Lost Chinatowns at a tech company in June, followed by a fully produced solo “scratch performance” and interactive installation of Lost Chinatowns as part of their New Works Festival on July 29, 2018 at Z Below in San Francisco.

Lost Chinatowns is a dance-theater work exploring the destruction, lost vibrancy, and historical erasure of Santa Cruz’s Chinatowns from 1860-1955. Santa Cruz, now known for being the ultra-liberal leftmost city of the US, was once the center of virulently xenophobic anti-Chinese racism in California in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The work’s visuals and texts will draw upon oral histories of former Chinatown residents, as well as historical archives of photographs,19th century anti-Chinese propaganda, and court transcripts of immigration cases. Lost Chinatowns aims to make connections between the historical othering of Asian bodies and current xenophobic regimes in the era of Trump as an act of interracial solidarity between people of color. Lost Chinatowns is being developed in part through Borders Resurfacing, a transnational creative exchange by the Post Natyam Collective.

Info on the Innovators Series: https://3girlstheatre.org/innovator-series/

Photo: Crystal Birns

photo: Cynthia Ling Lee

photo: Alison Leaf