Day Pass - ChuanFest @ Manhattan

ChuanFest is a four-day performance festival featuring AAPI and immigrant artists across poetry, movement, performance, and installation.
About this Event

Both venues are wheelchair accessible. For accessible seating, or any other questions related to tickets, please contact us at [email protected].

July 9

🕑: 05:30 PM - 06:30 PM
Vanishing 4.0 Opening Ritual
Host: Lisa Virginia

Info: Chuan” (船), meaning “boat” in Chinese, serves as the festival’s central metaphor—one that evokes collective passage, gathering, and departure. Vanishing (4.0) transforms the performance space into an immersive, participatory environment structured as a symbolic night-sailing boat, drawing from Chinese mythology and maritime histories.
The work unfolds as a solo performance featuring a dancer who embodies the role of a “boatperson,” alongside a participatory installation that evolves over the course of the event. Upon entry, audience members “board” the space by contributing objects, texts, or fragments from their own prior creative practices. These offerings become part of the boat’s growing structure, situating the audience as both witnesses and co-builders of the performance environment.

🕑: 06:30 PM - 07:20 PM
HAMLETMACHINE
Host: Ziwei Chen

Info: HAMLETMACHINE, an ongoing research-performance project grounded in Müller’s play and its afterlives—textual, theatrical, historical, and speculative. Starting from Die Hamletmaschine as both material and method, the project attends to questions of time, repetition, memory, and
transmission: how works persist, return, fracture, and reappear across contexts and generations.

🕑: 07:45 PM - 08:35 PM
Before it Hurts
Host: Cerulean Long

Info: Seven slices of life. A dance. A fight. A tattoo session.
What's the right way to hold onto someone? What's the right way to let go?
Before It Hurts is a physical theater performance, a relational duet consisting of seven scenes, each dissecting an intricate, intimate relationship formed around the death of another. Devised around a
scripted text and structured like a concept album, it presents a visceral navigation of the push and pull in various forms of intimacy and the messiness of grieving.

🕑: 09:00 PM - 09:40 PM
I am that I am
Host: Hung Ha

Info: This movement-based choreopoem is a "bible" for an entire theatrical world—shaping the dance, music, lighting, and staging through text that operates on multiple registers: spoken word, multilingual passages, and directorial inspiration. Rooted in the literary tradition of Holy Scripture, the work explores the indistinguishable relationship between worship and performance, asking what theater is if not a tribute to the divine. Across its chapters, it navigates liminalities of language, gender, sex, and sexuality—an archetypal story that transcends personal experience to speak to the universal condition of being in-between, in transition, and always crossing imaginary boundaries.

🕑: 09:00 PM
After the Burning (Opening poetry and dance hybrid piece for I am that I am)
Host: Wisteria Deng

Info: The piece deals with the dull ache of an unrequited love, when one feels too ashamed to call it grief. It lingers in the severance that follows: the aftermath of a controlled burn. But even more so, After the Burning portrays healing: the massive, forgiving rain after a fire; the spring; the growth; and the memories that will forever sizzle. Bringing together poetry and movement, After the Burning is a tender meditation on what remains after destruction, and what, against all odds, begins again

July 10

🕑: 05:30 PM - 06:30 PM
Vanishing 4.0 Opening Ritual
Host: Lisa Virginia

Info: "Chuan” (船), meaning “boat” in Chinese, serves as the festival’s central metaphor—one that evokes collective passage, gathering, and departure. Vanishing (4.0) transforms the performance space into an immersive, participatory environment structured as a symbolic night-sailing boat, drawing from Chinese mythology and maritime histories.
The work unfolds as a solo performance featuring a dancer who embodies the role of a “boatperson,” alongside a participatory installation that evolves over the course of the event. Upon entry, audience members “board” the space by contributing objects, texts, or fragments from their own prior creative practices. These offerings become part of the boat’s growing structure, situating the audience as both witnesses and co-builders of the performance environment.

🕑: 06:30 PM - 07:00 PM
Study of Skin
Host: Jane Su

Info: How does the body register movement across geographies? How does skin remember a life?
Trying to investigate these questions, Study of Skin unfolds as a lecture performance–turned–video, in which scientific diagrams of dermatitis and the boiling of Chinese herbal medicine coexist. It traces a personal lineage of allergy and eczema the artist was born with, framing it as a disease and also a mark making. Inflammatory and self-repairing, skin becomes a guide for navigating unfamiliar terrains and migrations across geographies.

🕑: 07:30 PM - 08:30 PM
Even Monkeys Fall From Tree
Host: Stella Oh

Info: At the crossroads of identity, language, and culture, what does it mean to live in the spaces in between? Through a whirlwind of memories, a young Korean American Girl grapples with the weight of generational expectation while navigating her relationship with her mother. This one-woman show invites audiences to a world where longing, belonging, and loving blur—where the things left unsaid speak the loudest.

🕑: 09:00 PM - 09:40 PM
SeekSaw
Host: Jieru Wang

Info:
Transforming the stage to a “meta-lab" of uncertainty, “who” and “not sure who” navigate the intersection of spiritual desire and tech-worship.
Inspired by the phenomenon of China’s youth using AI chatbots as fortune-tellers, Seeksaw explores our desperate craving for omniscience and the wanting of control. This funny, existential, original devised performance–part philosophical inquiry into fate, part mutual consulting for dog-shit level anxieties–captures a snapshot of our era: a time of no questions or no answers, what is next?

🕑: 09:55 PM - 10:30 PM
Vanishing 4.0 Closing Ritual + Reception