An afternoon of dance and music: "Run all the way home" and "The Phoenix"

Hung Liu was heralded in The New York Times as “a Chinese American artist whose work merged past and present, East and West.”

This performance—written, choreographed, and performed by an all Asian-American team—continues this conversation by centering diasporic and intergenerational stories.
Program:

Run all the way home
Run all the way home is a story about a mother, a grandmother, and a granddaughter. Loosely framed by the increasingly personal retellings of Little Red Riding Hood, the piece follows each character as they navigate their differences in identity, place, and homeland, dancing their stories to life.
Performers
Eli Shi (Choreographer, Director)

Eli Shi is a dancer and choreographer from Los Angeles. A graduate of Stanford University, Eli now dances with Alex Ketley/The Foundry. Their choreographic work excavates landscapes of human connection, exploring love, grief, and the ghosts that linger between people. For Eli, every solo is a duet, and every duet is two solos; the core of the story lies in our need for one another.

Anna Zheng (Writer, Director, Dramaturg)

Anna is a director, deviser, and writer. They are interested in acts of adaptation: of stories, of bodies, to other people, to inhospitable environments. Recent directing credits: Three States of Matter, a devised climate migration adaptation of Three Sisters, Constellations with Eli Shi, Man of God.

Sebastian Blue (Sound Design)
Tristan Ching Hartmann (Dancer, Voice Actor)
Norma Fong (Dancer)
Josie Friedman (Musician)
Hiroka Nagai (Dancer)
amara tabor-smith (Voice Actor)
Serena Tran (Voice Actor)
Victor Xie
Petites esquisses d'oiseaux – Olivier Messiaen
The Phoenix – Victor Xie
Victor will open with colorful birdsong from Messiaen’s *Petites esquisses d'oiseaux*, then present newly-composed piano works from his ongoing series *The Phoenix*.
Through repeated exploration of motifs like bells and birdsong, Victor seeks to gain deep insight into the piano’s acoustic capabilities outside of the western classical framework. Bells have historically symbolized structure; For instance, ancient Chinese bells like the bianzhong（编钟）established the first scales and provided the basis for court rituals, creating an acoustic space of balance between heaven, skies and earth. Meanwhile, birdsong, descending from the sky, unravels into an ecstatic blend of emotions and expressions in Chinese myths and imagery.
Following the theme of rebirth and renewal through multiple generations, these pieces will explore both temporal and physical distance - the distant ancient culture and mythologies, and vastly differing worldviews and aesthetics between east and west.

About Victor Xie - MM Composition, studio of Lowell Liebermann

Victor is a composer of contemporary concert music and free improvisor. His musical performances range from all-Baroque to Contemporary-Classical programs, to Jazz, free improvisation, silent-film improvisation and more. Victor Xie completed his BM in piano performance with Prof. Alexander Korsantia and Mr. Victor Rosenbaum at the New England Conservatory of Music. He studied Composition briefly with Prof. Alla Cohen and John Heiss in 2020. He recently graduated in 2023 with a MM in Composition under the instruction of Prof. Huang Ruo and Prof. Lowell Liebermann at Mannes School of Music.

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