Freedom Play

Performance

2016

produced through residency with IN>TIME 2016 Performance Festival

Freedom Play is a play on freedom in five acts. The artist considers displacement as a method and their history as a refugee to reflect on freedom, both personal and political, and to subvert restrictions of representationalist borders—of nation states, identities, and ontologies.

The cast-off furniture, recycled for the mixed-use space of the Bridge Theater, a theater inside a Lutheran Church where the performance takes place, is re-cast.

Act 1: The performer breaks off a part of the stage while a Vietnamese song of revolution relays the story of the Trung sisters.

Act 2: The actor performs a monologue from Maria Irene Fornes’ play Drowning three ways.

Act 3: The audience is prompted to sing along to a karaoke version of We the People Sing from Les Miserables.

Act 4: Performer displaces audience by restructuring configuration of chairs and stage for the last act.