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.