Michelle Sui // D+R Residency

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Part of Michelle Sui’s D+R Residency

November 12–18, 2018

CREATIVE TEAM
Michelle Sui: Creator/Performer

ABOUT THE RESIDENCY
Performance artist Michelle Sui’s residency will focus on research and reconstructions that extend from the 1937 classic film Street Angel starring mega-star and singer Zhou Xuan. The film industry’s constructions of the tragic female heroine and the Chinese feminine mystique are interrogated, as well as Los Angeles’ similarly constructed Chinatown, home to much of L.A.’s current art and performance scene. Research in collaboration with local historic institutions and residents is paired with famous songs from the Street Angel, activating Chinatown’s public space with widely untold histories that parallel the film’s dramatic plot of displacement. Sui tackles fictions, stereotypes—and the space we share in the ultra-performative City of Angels—to voice a forgotten histories and to reveal a place of resilience that continues to reinvent itself.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Michelle Sui is a Chinese-born, Los Angeles-raised multidisciplinary performer, composer, choreographer and director. Her original works range from solo performances, dance films, site specific installations and immersive theatrical compositions integrating theatre, ritual, music, dance, video and interactive/new media and technology. Much of her work exists at the intersection of forms and draws upon body as geography, language in translation, and the politics and landscapes of femininity. Her ongoing research in the human voice and women’s folk music traditions has taken her to Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and various autonomous regions of China. She frequently leads embodied voice workshops in the U.S. and internationally. Her works have been presented in Germany, Italy, the Republic of Georgia, and the U.S.

She is the recipient of a 2016 La MaMa Umbria NEXT GENERATION artist residency, and a finalist for the 2016 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers. In 2017 she founded Nü House, a curatorial platform that facilitates conversations across borders and connects diverse artists and communities around the world.
www.michellesui.com

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Collaboratively offered by Los Angeles Performance Practice and Automata, and supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.