What a wonderful week!  Today was the end of the 3rd Annual National Asian American Theater Conference and Festival, and what an inspiring and dynamic week it was! Today I saw the last two shows the Festival, Soomi Kim’s “Dictee,” and Post Natyam Collective’s “Sunoh! Tell Me Sister.”  Both pieces were a great way to end my experience here, being the most experimental in form of all the shows this week.  They were both multimedia dance/theater pieces that explored issues of culture and gender – they were very abstract, but incredibly brave and bold in exploring new ways of telling stories.  There was live audio mixing in “Dictee,” and some beautiful projection layering and live feed camera work in “Sunoh! Tell Me Sister.”  Technology is definitely a new direction that theater is playing with, and I applaud the women in these performances for exploring the uncharted in our field, especially in our particular community.

I know I am going to go through post-ConFest withdrawal – but I will also welcome the time and the space to really percolate on what I have learned and discovered this week.  A part of me wants to run home right now, hole myself up in some perky cafe or at my kitchen table in Queens and write, write, write, create, create, create!  I do feel a wave of momentum rising in me, a confidence and inspiration motivated by all the talented, kind, and generous souls I met this week, and am proud to call them all a part of my artistic family.  I urge every one at the Festival to remember what I think is the most important thing we have witnessed here – that despite the difficulties, differences, whatever politics come up – we have each other.  We are very lucky, and we cannot do it alone.  And we are not alone.  We are in reality, many.  Abundant and energetic.  Responsible for all.  I think if we do not fail to remember one other, we will be always full, always focused and resolute.

Many days when I am lost, my partner reminds me to ground myself by tracing my roots, digging them deep and down. This week, I hit water.

Photo: Andre Andreev

In a fluid layering of video, live dance, and theater, SUNOH! TELL ME SISTER brings to life subversive stories of women’s erotic power and resistance. An excavation of seldom heard South Asian female voices from the historical dancer-courtesan of the Indian subcontinent to the contemporary survivor of domestic violence. In collaboration with AWAZ, the violence prevention group of the South Asian Network.

“Talk about fusion – not only did Bollywood meet rap meet performance art meet modern dance and bharata natyam but there was humor, depth and beauty to burn.” — Victoria Looseleaf, Los Angeles Times

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

JUKEBOX STORIES is a critically acclaimed storytelling, song-singing, bingo-playing, comic duo that features Thai-American playwright/performer Prince Gomolvilas and singer/songwriter Brandon Patton and that has toured nationwide to theaters, bars, colleges, comedy clubs, coffeehouses, music venues, bowling alleys, and other weird performance spaces. Performing for the first time in three years, Prince and Brandon return with new tales and tunes, classic pieces from the past, and an expertly integrated bingo game that will have audience members vying for the Asian-est prizes this side of Little Tokyo! What will Prince have to say about UCLA student Alexandra Wallace, the proposed all-white Akira, and, of course, his beloved sister? How will Brandon look surrounded by a festival full of Asians? How could a show that’s constructed randomly by the audience be so much damn fun? www.jukeboxstories.com

“Jukebox Stories takes a classic idea and gives it a modern spin. Fun, fresh and decidedly untheatrical. Jukebox Stories is a sturdy piece of post-modern cabaret, and Gomolvilas and Patton nicely fill their roles as hip, urban troubadours!” — The Oakland Tribune

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Photo: Kenny Wong

DICTEE, a new work, is a multi-media dance theater performance based on the text of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s seminal literary collage. Through interchangeable disciplines of spoken text, movement, music, experimental sound and video, performing artists Soomi Kim and Jen Shyu share the stories of brave women who are ordinary, revolutionary, and extraordinary in their common experiences of suffering and transcendence of suffering.

“Soomi Kim is a commanding presence as Bruce Lee. It takes mere seconds to see beyong her gender, and she convincingly portrays one of the most popular male action stars of the 20th Century. Bruce Lee would be proud.” — nytheatre.com, Jason S. Grossman on the piece Lee/gendary

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Photo: Desi Vorgeas

THE PASSION OF EL HULK HOGANCITO is a semi-autobiographical, transdisciplnary, multi-media, literary performance. Hason, the supposedly fictional narrator, wrestles with authorship and obsession, loses the Third Grade Show and Tell showdown, muses on the mentorship of WWF wrestlers, investigates the history of his crybabyness, and explores the trauma of the FBI’s 1970 racist criminalization of two recently immigrated Filipina nurses, one of whom happens to be his mother.

“As horrifying, deeply American, kinda maybe David-Lynch-meets-hip-hop narratives go, this one is a doozy.” — SF Weekly

“Start with the title…Weird but familiar, Catholic and all-american but rendered in Spanish, made somewhat foreign and strange and yet faintly hilarious.” — San Diego CityBeat

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Second to last night of the Festival! Saw “10 Reasons Why I’d Be A Bad Porn Star” by May Lee Yang, and NAATCO’s production of Caryl Churchill’s “A Number.”  Two really different shows that asked some interesting questions surrounding issues such as sex education and the representation of sexuality in Asian American culture, and the importance of Asian American visibility in non-Asian American works.  Thoughtful evening!

Photo: Don Perrault

ENCOUNTER explores the different kinds of encounters in contemporary human life: encounter of the human soul with the divine, encounter with self, encounter with lover, encounter with gravity, and encounter with the military.

“…modern dance, Indian  martial arts, aerial dance, Bollywood’s pop influences—all with an eye for originality and a skillful use of space, sending dancers into eye catching floor patterns.” — Boston Globe

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Photo: Ami Patel

PULL incorporates monologues, recorded interviews, and aerial arts to tell stories of people’s obsessions, from the mundane to the supernatural. PULL examines the effects they have on people’s lives and relationships. When do we pull them back?

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Photo: Jen Long

ARCHIPELAGO: ISLANDS OF LAND, WATER AND LEGEND is a new multi-disciplinary work directed and performed by Denise Uyehara in collaboration with video artist Adam Cooper-Terán, with appearances by Natalie Brewster Nguyen and Marcos Najera.

Through a nexus of video, monologue, music and ritual, Archipelago remixes ancient origin myths of Okinawa (Japan’s southern-most islands) and Native people of the American Southwest, situating them in contemporary times.

Archipelago harnesses the cultural resonance found on “islands” – islands situated in the desert and islands found in the ocean. It investigates the metaphor of water that winds through early origin stories, citing narrative, iconography and deities from Ryukyu kingdom and various tribes of the American Southwest — the Yaqui, Navajo, Huichol, and Tohono O’odham nations. The performance also sheds light on how these cultures have survived as islands — geographic or metaphoric in nature — in the midst of colonization from surrounding forces. Hailing from mixed heritage identities (Uyehara is of Okinawan and Japanese lineage, Cooper-Teran a Chicano-Russian of Yaqui decent), ARCHIPELAGO sheds light on issues of authenticity, appropriation and the recreation of myth for cultural survival.

Archipelago is currently in development with support from the NPN Creation Fund and premieres in its entirety at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica in February 2012, and subsequently at Dinnerware Artspace in Tucson.

“Compelling…as graceful and agile on stage as she is on the page…Uyehara is definitely one to watch.” — Los Angeles Times

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Photo: William P. Steele

In A NUMBER, Caryl Churchill explores the human experience, the essence of personality, and nature versus nurture as a man confronts his father after discovering that he has several siblings — each, one of his clones. Since the arrival of Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned in the late-90s, the possibility of human cloning has sparked controversy. This Asian American production with James Saito and Joel de la Fuente draws attention to the fact that despite the fabric of American life being made up of diverse and complex cultural threads, American theatre is woefully behind the times in reflecting this on stage.