NEW WORK IN PROGRESS
Magnolia Yang Sao Yia + Lydia Li
CASUAL
Tuesday, October 18, 2022 at 8pm
FRANKIE / 300 S. MISSION RD
CASUAL returns! Originally piloted in 2019, CASUAL provides Los Angeles artists with an opportunity to show a work in process. CASUAL supports artists who are looking to engage in a critical exchange with audiences by presenting their work in the early to mid stages of development. The new work can be loose. Anything between the spark of an idea or an excerpt from a new performance that is ready to be tested in front of an audience. CASUAL aims to create a space for experimentation with a friendly audience that feels useful to the artist’s practice and process.
remembering // Magnolia Yang Sao Yia
Identity can be understood as a relative and relational process of being and becoming. As a stateless person in diaspora, my identity as HMoob often feels both intensified and decentered. I am a body that involuntarily carries multiple colonial and imperial legacies of displacement, whether conscious or not. In this way, remembering is to remember otherwise — to unearth and center subjugated knowledge and memories. My project (of) remembering is a performative ritual/practice that calls on the dancing body (an embodied archival technology) to insist on remembering HMoob knowledge systems and ways of being. remembering is my radical act of resilience and self-determination.
Ryotatio 回马枪 // Lydia Li
Magnolia Yang Sao Yia, dance artist and scholar, is a daughter of HMoob refugees and a former undocumented immigrant. Born in Cholet, France, she was raised on lands first stewarded by Anishinaabe and Dakota peoples (Metro Detroit, MI and Twin Cities, MN). As a choreographer, Magnolia works to activate dancers’ bodily histories and knowledges to craft performative sociopolitical conversations, critiques, and inquiries on stage. She is also a Ph.D. candidate in Critical Dance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Southeast Asian Studies from University of California, Riverside. She holds a BFA in Dance and Minor in Asian American Studies from University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her dissertation examines Hmong dance as a site of HMoob identity formation in the U.S. diaspora. Working from a transnational feminist and decolonial praxis, she imagines and works to activate a cultural politic of HMoob belonging and self-determination that is critical of white supremacist and heteronormative patriarchal systems of power.
Lydia are a Chinese and American actor currently nomading between LA and NY. They play in theaters and on films, channeling intimate, colorful, weird, and grande stories about resistance, rebirth, romance, and diaspora. Highlights: The Hidden Territories of The Bacchae (Double Edge Theatre), Sonar Es Luchar by A Todo Dar Production (Pregones and Cara Mia Theatre), Little Red Book or Plural Bodies (NOW Festival, REDCAT), Rasgos Asiáticos by Virginia Grise, The Map by Robert Wilson (on pandemic halt), April 4th (feature film).
CASUAL is supported in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency. Learn more at www.arts.ca.gov. Los Angeles Performance Practice is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture. The LAX Festival is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.
