2018 Innovators- Cynthia Ling Lee
For over a hundred years, San Francisco has been known as a center of artistic creativity and innovation. More recently, the City has also become known as the center for technological innovation and progress. 3Girls Theatre’s Innovators Series is an exciting program that is creating opportunities to connect the innovators of the art communities with the innovators of the tech communities.
Cynthia Ling Lee instigates postcolonial, queer, and feminist-of-color interventions in the field of Asian diasporic performance. Her interdisciplinary performance work has been presented at major theaters and alternative venues throughout the United States, Asia, and Europe. Cynthia is an assistant professor of theater arts at UC Santa Cruz and a member of the Post Natyam Collective, a transnational, web-based coalition of dance artists whose work triangulates between art-making, activism, and theory. www.cynthialinglee.com
Cynthia’s latest project, Lost Chinatowns, will be a multimedia dance-theater work exploring the destruction, lost vibrancy, and historical erasure of Santa Cruz’s Chinatowns from 1860-1955. Santa Cruz, now known as the ultra-liberal “leftmost” city of the US, was once the center of virulent anti-Chinese racism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Lost Chinatowns aims to connect the historical othering of Asian bodies and current xenophobic regimes in the era of Trump as an act of interracial solidarity between communities of color.
LOST CHINATOWNS at the 2018 New Works Festival
Writer/dancer/performance artist Cynthia Ling Lee was fascinating in Lost Chinatowns, a multimedia dance-theater work-in-progress exploring the vibrancy and eventual disappearance of Santa Cruz’s Chinatowns from 1860-1955.
