By Pam Rocker
The media is aquiver with top ten lists of the last year. Top celebrity break-ups, political gaffes, tweets, iPhone apps. Top ten words we shouldn’t bring into 2010, which includes ‘tweets’ and ‘apps’. Today I found myself consumed with these lists until I realized how little I actually cared about them.
I don’t want to know how many statements Sarah Palin had to apologize for and I’m sick of counting Tiger Wood’s harem. Looking into the past holds little excitement for me, unless there’s something worth looking for; a memory to hold for awhile, a lost love to linger over, a connection with a person or place that gives us a clue about who we are today.
One of the things I adore about live theatre is the immediate human connection. There is something so simple yet so mystical about seeing another person standing right in front of you; heart beating, blood pumping, lungs pushing air in and out. This phenomenon can never be duplicated in a film. I am constantly in awe of one-person shows and the fact that a solitary human being can catch and hold the attention of a crowd of people. They are their own instrument, and if they play it well, we all get something that we crave; the chance to be a part of something bigger than ourselves.
This February, at Calgary’s Theatre Junction, we will have the opportunity to connect with world-renowned storyteller and photographer, William Yang. In his performance work, China, the Australian born Yang takes us with him as he returns to a homeland that he never knew. Yang began to embrace his Chinese heritage in the late 1980’s, something that had been suppressed and denied in his childhood. He weaves his story together with monologues, images and video shot during four trips to China from 1989 to 2005.
Yang started out as a playwright in 1969 and then as a freelance photographer he caused a huge sensation with his first solo exhibition Sydneyphiles and its candid depiction of the Sydney gay and party culture. In 1989, he began to integrate his skills as a writer and as a visual artist by performing monologues in tandem with images on a slide projector in the theatre. Since then, this has become his favoured way of showing his work and telling his stories.
We can expect to be stimulated on many levels by Yang’s work, says Theatre Junction Producer, Bryan Rudelich. “Yang is a photographer, but is so much more than a photographer, and has chosen to weave his skills as a writer and performer into how he shows his photographs. Yang is both incredibly sincere and soft spoken in his approach and it’s hard not to be charmed by his quiet magic. The journey Yang invites us on as he recalls his own discovery of China is truly a feast for the senses, and Nicholas Ng’s accompaniment on the erhu [Chinese violin] subtly helps transport us to Yang’s ancestral lands.”
The work that Yang creates has always asked big questions about culture, heritage and belonging. In 2002 he performed an excerpt of his show Friends of Dorothy, a social history of Gay Sydney, in a forum that was the first public discussion of homosexuality in China. His show Sadness, which was made into a film, provided an unexpected celebration of life, set against his observations of the loss of friends to AIDS.
Personal and truthful, simple and extraordinary, China is Yang’s ninth monologue performance in a career that has seen him become Australia’s most toured artist. “William Yang’s China is a story about the discovery, or rather re-discovery of his cultural identity,” says Rudelich. “As a third-generation Australian Chinese exploring a culture, country, and language he never knew, Yang shares a story that Calgarians should be able to appreciate. There are many of us that share Yang’s disconnection from our parents’ and grandparents’ culture—a connection that was slowly lost over the generations. I think people will find it interesting what Yang’s story can reveal to us all about how we identify as Canadians and how we identify as individuals. Chinese, Canadian, gay, straight, male, female—Yang’s exploration is really about what we choose to call ourselves.”
Theatre Junction calls themselves ‘Calgary’s culturehouse of contemporary live arts’ with a mandate to create new work with their own multi-disciplinary Resident Company of Artists (RCA), and to present Canadian and international artists that are contemporary and have a unique voice and vision. While Yang has been touring for years, and they are just undertaking the first tour of their latest show On the Side of the Road this spring, Theatre Junction’s RCA has a lot in common with Yang.
“We are both looking for new ways to connect with others and share our stories in the theatre,” shares Rudelich. “Yang is a mould breaker who decided years ago that the dividing silos within the arts didn’t work for what he needed to say. He didn’t let the limits stop him, so he created a new form. Since we are committed to education and professional development, we’re offering a workshop where artists from any discipline can come learn about Yang’s approach and how to apply it to his or her own professional practice.”
Providing us with an evocative look into the past, and an intimate glimpse at the intricacies of ancestry, culture and identity, the journey to China should be well worth it.
