VENUS AND ADONIS
What can live performance reveal that video cannot? How can revisiting archival works in real-time open new ways to experience language, space, and embodiment? Drawing on live archival research inspired by Bruce Nauman and Yvonne Rainer, this project invites performers of diverse gender identities to repeatedly enact the same speech material, exploring how rhythm, tone, and spatial resonance transform meaning.
How does space shape perception? Empty rooms, public art sites, and hybrid venues are treated as lived environments. Binary divisions like performer/audience or public/private are juxtaposed with overlapping zones, creating relational atmospheres. Audiences navigate these spaces dynamically, experiencing boundaries as fluid and participatory.
What happens when sound, silence, and visual media interact? Multi-channel projections visualize gestures, expressions, and speech acts while live performance alternates between voiced and silent states. Sudden pauses and flowing audiovisuals create immersive, sometimes unsettling environments, inviting reflection on the subtleties of language, power, and identity.
Movements are fluid and unpredictable, inspired by drip gestures, avoiding fixed gendered postures. Trajectories start at audience peripheries and activate the entire space, turning the venue into a dynamic, layered canvas. Through these embodied experiences, audiences perceive movement, identity, and space as interconnected, multi-sensory layers.
CONCEPT/DIRECTER/DRAMATURGY/ SCENOGRAPHY DESIGN
JIaming Wang
PERFORMERS
Miles Golby, Valentina Zehra Angleucci , Lizzie Pinchard ,
Emil Kashmir Bojahr, Simone Martis, Helen Gu, Lishuang Yang
CHOREPGRAPHER
JACOB ZANG
LIGHTING SUPPORT
Sheron Luo
COSTUME DESIGN
Hongyi He
AI & INTERACTION DIGITAL DESIGN PRODUCTION
Fu Jie, Yinwen Xu
STAGE MANAGER
Jean He
SOUND TECHNICIAN ENGINEER
Kristina Kapilin
LIGHTING HEAD
Luke Cunningham
SOUND and DIGITAL DESIGN
Check Him Lam
COORDINATION HEAD
Faust Peneyra, Shao Kai Wang
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Athina Vahla, Peter Brooks, Mina Alacalioglu
WHITE LAB, PERFORMANCE SPACE