Artificial Nana/ 人工娜娜
- 2018/ San Francisco
Choreographed and directed by Kuan-Hsuan Lee
Costume Design: Kuan-Ying Lee
Lighting Design: House Dow, Kuan-Hsuan Lee
Props: Kuan-Ying Lee, Joshua McDermott
Music: “Naturträne” by Nina Hagen,
“Waltz No. 2” by Dmitri Shostakovish,
“Zeldas Theme” by Pérez Prado
“Pavanne” by Ahmad Jamal
Sound Edit: Kuan-Hsuan Lee
Premiered on March 2nd, 2018 at Studio Theater, University of San Francisco.
I created “Artificial Nana/人工娜娜” in 2018.
This piece of work reflected my desire to dive into my relationship with my social identity as a “woman”. During that time, Taiwan entered the preparation time for its first public vote for legalizing gay marriage and improving gender and sexuality related education; discussions were firing up. Through the discussions, the realization of how serious the oppressions were toward certain groupsof people astonished and depressed me. While being inspired by the essence of queer theory, creating a piece that serves the function to deconstruct the constructed cultural implications on genders fascinated me terribly. So I started observing my own process of learning to be a “woman”;
…unsurprisingly, there is a lot of fixing and altering came into my mind with all the confusion, struggling, self-punishing and satisfaction. And I started having this infatuation of exhibiting these learning and performing this process that we do daily in a show and as a show, but with exaggeration; I took the “performing” function of performance to describe my daily presentation process: I perform a girl; I perform a woman; I perform a certain level of maturity for a certain age;
This piece is highly culturally specific and personal. It was done in 2018, with touring performances in 2018-2019.
Curabitur eu rutrum nulla. Etiam dapibus justo id facilisis
ullamcorper.