Select Works
Everybody Has To Be Somewhere
Voila! Festival 2024
Created and performed by Xi Chen and Julian Maynard Smith
Deviser: Styles Li and Hanfang Sun
An intergenerational collaboration between a young emerging Chinese artist and a semi-retired old-timer from the UK - two performers who find their identities as physical beings merging - challenged by the unexplained accidents involved in their coming together.
Simple structures of time and causality develop into complex interactions that evoke the roles that memory, culture and difference have in their relationship. Everybody Has To Be Somewhere grows organically from a seed and shows how our perception of time shapes and fragments our reality, making each performance unique and unrepeatable.
Traces of The Wind
Vault Fringe Festival 2023
Co-created and performed by Xi Chen, Jiajing Zhao and Jiuming Duan (Not Set group)
A poetic, multi-sensory exploration of our ineffable, bodily and spiritual links with the wind.
The performance traces unseen forces of the wind that evoke subtle emotions and memories on stage.
The project began by interviewing people about their memories of wind. We gathered stories and memories from interviewees across various cultural and social backgrounds. This series of experiences were then designed according to collective inter-individual experiences of wind utilizing a theatrical, sonic, and technological approach.
