Lost Chinatowns Material

I'm fortunate to have Meena and Shyamala working with me on my "Lost Chinatowns" project as video projectionist and director, respectively.   “Lost Chinatowns” explores the destruction and historical erasure of Santa Cruz’s Chinatowns from 1860-1955.  In fall 2016, I created a short performance art work in which I build and dismantle sculptural abstractions of each of Santa Cruz’s five Chinatowns, incorporating archival visual materials such as photographs, newspaper clippings, and maps.  I became interested in creating another manifestation of the work involving my live dancing body and video projection.  This March, Meena came to Santa Cruz, where we did a film shoot of the existing performance art version of Lost Chinatowns, as well as taking footage on location at the sites where Chinatowns used to stand in Santa Cruz.  More recently, as director, Shyamala gave me a couple of choreographic assignments, asking me to work with the idea of building and collapsing while treating my body as building material.

Today, we had fun bringing together some of the video and movement material!  Meena manipulates the video live using VJ software.  Here are a few snippets from our experiments (the password for all is "chinatown".)  (Note that the second video is the same as the first part of the third video, but I liked the timing of the second video better.)

Front St Running Chinese from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.

Crawlspace Chinese Must Go from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.

Crawl Space Burn from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.

Portrait Tombstone from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.

Borders Resurfacing Improvisations

Today the four of us had an online improvisation session for Borders Resurfacing via Zoom.  Priya Srinivasan provided us with the following guidelines: 

"Tell a short story each about being stopped at the airport station or border from your personal experience and/or a time when you were stopped because you looked different bc of race gender sexuality ? How did it make you feel ? How has it shaped the way you now move at borders airports spaces where your body has been policed before ?

- Do not write this down ahead of time but you can tell it to yourself to get the gist of it and when you are all together on zoom share that story and record it

- after everyone has heard the story the first time repeat it again and see what movements the other 3 are able to create while you are retelling this story 

- if time permits tell the story for the3rd time this time incorporating everyone else's moves while you are retelling the story and have others watch you 

See what emerges in response to the 4 stories repeated 3 times" 

Below are steps 2 and 3 (narration of story while others improvise, and a solo improvisation incorporating others' movements) for each person.  The password for all is "zoom!".

Babli Narration Group Improv 4_17 from Post Natyam Collective on Vimeo.

Babli solo from Post Natyam Collective on Vimeo.

Cyn Narration Group Improv from Post Natyam Collective on Vimeo.

Cyn solo from Post Natyam Collective on Vimeo.

Meena Narration Group Improv from Post Natyam Collective on Vimeo.


Meena solo from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.

Shy Narration Group Improv from Post Natyam Collective on Vimeo.

Shy solo from Post Natyam Collective on Vimeo.