Meet the Innovators
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. We at 3Girls Theatre think it’s a pretty big waste of potential that there aren’t more opportunities to connect the innovators of the art communities with the innovators of the tech communities.
The Innovators Series is our proposal for a first step toward fixing this.
MEET THE 3GT INNOVATORS
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.
Liar Liar, founded by Akaina Ghosh, Madison Wetzell, and Jacob Ritts, reinterprets Classical narratives through feminist lenses. Utilizing physical, immersive, and interactive theater practices, Liar Liar explores unconventional methods of storytelling that re-center feminine voices and revolutionize the theatrical experience. Liar Liar’s first production, The Bacchae: For Madwomen Only, translated and adapted from Euripides’ play by Wetzell and directed by Ghosh, debuted in Tilden Park during the Summer of 2017.
Liar Liar’s upcoming Two Coins for the Ferryman will send six audience members on a quest through the Greek underworld. Each audience member will embody a hero from Greek mythology, each with their own task to complete. The audience-members-turned-heroes will negotiate a transporting immersive space guided by a rich cast of underworld characters. With a mix of traditional storytelling, physical theater, and immersive spatial puzzles, this play will tell six unique stories of life and death, love, loss, black magic, and overcoming the impossible.
Bowstring, featuring devisers Emma Shelton, Jena McRae, Siobhan Marie Doherty, Jaime Lee Hart, Molly Benson, Lexie Papedo, Margery Fairchild, and Gabrielle Patacsil, collectively weave personal experiences and family histories into multi-disciplinary performances in the San Francisco Bay Area. Bowstring creates rich, immersive stories that blend music, dance, theater, technology, and comedy to explore the evolution of womanhood over generations.
Bowstring’s newest collaboration, Triple Maven [working title], is inspired by the true story of three teenage siblings in the 1850’s who, to save the family farm, tour the country by steam train as dancers. This fantastical and non-linear narrative will trace themes of sisterhood, dislocation, personal freedom, and the embodied experience of womanhood. Characters in Triple Maven are drawn from Bowstring’s own ancestors. The audience will be invited to invoke their own family, to influence the show’s backdrop, and to share something deeply personal, yet anonymous, onstage.
