Chi-wang Yang

Artist, Educator/Teacher, Performer, Technologist

Chi-wang Yang is a Los Angeles-based theater director. Committed to physical performance and cross-disciplinary experimentation, his work combines notions of stage, media, and body. He is a founding member of video performance collective Cloud Eye Control. His work has been featured at EXIT Festival, REDCAT, Time-Based Arts Festival, SF International Film Festival, Platform International Animation Festival, NY International Fringe Festival, and the Edinburgh International Festival Fringe. Recent projects include Under Polaris, the latest sci-fi techo opera by Cloud Eye Control. Last fall he traveled to Havana to world premier The Closest Farthest Away/Entrañable Lejanía, a groundbreaking new theatrical collaboration between theater and film artists in the US and Cuba. The production was presented by special invitation at the Havana International Film Festival and will have it's US premier in Miami this spring. Chi-wang received his MFA in Theater Directing and Integrated Media at the California Institute of the Arts, where he currently teaches. Other training includes the SITI Company with Anne Bogart, the Kitchen Summer Institute, and Brown University (BA). Chi-wang was the recipient of the 2006 Princess Grace Award for Theater Directing. http://www.mysteriously.org

Inherent in our daily lives is the tactile experience of the world around us, which the body responds to with its own logic and honesty. Yet our perception of the world is increasingly mediatized, accelerated, flattened and fragmented by our interactions with technology. While such “distributed narratives†(to borrow a concept from computer science) can distance us from ourselves, they can also enable us to see with a perspective and intimacy not possible before. At the core of my purpose as a theater director is this imperative: to better understand the complex tapestry of physical and technological experiences that shape us. By combining live performance with new media on stage, colliding and combining layers of image, movement, and text, I try to expand how characters and narratives are represented and create a fuller, perhaps more democratic platform for storytelling.

Directing, Interdisciplinary Collaboration, Performance, theater