Irene Hsiao
Untitled (After Tang Chang)
Thursday, November 8 at 7:30 pm
Saturday, November 10 at 7:30 pm
TICKETS AND SCHEDULE
BACK TO FESTIVAL HOME PAGE
Saturday, November 10 at 7:30 pm
TICKETS AND SCHEDULE
BACK TO FESTIVAL HOME PAGE
Ethnically Chinese, nationally Thai poet and painter Tang Chang distilled writing to its emotional and physical impulses, ritualistically copying over words until they formed landscapes and geometric forms, stripping calligraphy down to the abstract trace of the body on canvas. Dancer Irene Hsiao takes the energetic impulses he leaves behind in his work and reads them as a score for movement, embodying these traces in our space and time, considering questions such as, what is the difference between writing and painting? When does the mark erase? How Chinese is this work? What does it mean to write, again and again, "person"?
Irene Hsiao is a dancer, writer, and art enthusiast. In addition to this piece, inspired by the first American solo exhibition of Thai artist Tang Chang at the Smart Museum of Art, Irene's recent work includes Dialogo Dialogo, in/on/at/with Virginio Ferrari's sculpture Dialogo, accompanied by composer and carillonneur Joey Brink, and The Radiant and the Dead, a site-specific collaboration with Connor Plunkett and India Weston on Emmanuel Pratt's Radical (Re)Constructions installation, both presented by the Smart. She has also danced with the fish in Philippe Parreno's My Room Is Another Fish Bowl at the Art Institute, with the monsters in the Smart's Monster Roster. As a dancer, she has worked with Kinetech Arts, Alma Esperanza Cunningham Movement, Labayen Dance/SF, Lenora Lee Dance, Winifred Haun & Dancers, Erica Mott Productions, South Chicago Dance Theatre, Yin He Dance, and projects by Carole McCurdy, Nejla Yatkin, and others. Her writing has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, SF Weekly, Chicago Reader, KQED Arts, Bay Area Reporter, Newcity, Cambridge Quarterly, Victorian Poetry, Multi-Ethnic Literature of the US, Literary Imagination, Modern Philology, Word Riot, elimae, A Clean Well-Lighted Place, and Sweet, as well as in the book Peter Pan In and Out of Time. Her picture book Letter from Taipei was published in 2014. Irene is on staff in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Chicago.
Special thanks to Orianna Cacchione, Curator of Global Contemporary Art at the Smart Museum of Art, Erik L. Peterson, Manager of Family Programs and Student Engagement at the Smart Museum of Art, Amy Ruehl, Assistant Registrar at the Smart Museum of Art, and Cary Shoda, Artistic Director of A-Squared Theatre.
TICKETS AND SCHEDULE
BACK TO FESTIVAL HOME PAGE
Special thanks to Orianna Cacchione, Curator of Global Contemporary Art at the Smart Museum of Art, Erik L. Peterson, Manager of Family Programs and Student Engagement at the Smart Museum of Art, Amy Ruehl, Assistant Registrar at the Smart Museum of Art, and Cary Shoda, Artistic Director of A-Squared Theatre.
TICKETS AND SCHEDULE
BACK TO FESTIVAL HOME PAGE