Performance Dates & Times
Friday January 17th at 7:30pm
Saturday January 18th at 3pm
Saturday January 18th at 7:30pm

Location
20 Putnam Avenue in Brooklyn, C or G train to Clinton-Washington. Accessible station at Franklin Avenue C/Shuttle train.

Content Warning
The show includes incense, and language around death.

Xiaoyue Zhang: Braiding Water

This performance is apart of The Exponential Festival.

Created and Performed by Xiaoyue Zhang
Performance Collaborators: Hua Huang, Shaofen Shi
Co-directed by Brittney Brady, Xiaoyue Zhang
Dramaturg by Brittney Brady
Lighting Design & Creative Technical Collaboration by Kelley Shih
Sound Design by Haruhi Kobayashi
Scenic Consultation by QingAn Zhang
Sound Consultation by Lai-Luen Liang
Produced by Xiaoyue Zhang

Braiding Water is a tender dialogue with grief, an imagined mourning ritual that has been lost or forcibly erased for losses that could not be named.

"Drawing loosely on historical tragedies in China from the 1950s to the present, I trace the experiences of loss and silence across four generations in my family through this solo performance. Honoring the family tradition – Traditional Chinese Massage therapy practices, I delve into the somatic relics of grief, seeking to understand the rituals and physical actions that accompany emotional processing.​"

Braiding Water examines the unreliability of memory and the interplay between individual and historical narratives, all while attempting to digitize the otherworldly presence of those we’ve lost.

"This project for me is a perpetual practice that connects me to my family – as a daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter. History and trauma may have stripped away many storytelling forms and traditions through which we could remember, but we always have our bodies to return to. The pain and tension that grow beneath our skin might be an invitation for us to look inward to connect with our lineage.”

Special thanks to LA Performance Practice and Theater MITU for supporting the development of this piece.

About the Artist
Xiaoyue Zhang is a performance, (moving) image, and jewelry maker from China with mutable skillsets across disciplines, including directing, performing, choreography, producing, production managing, dramaturgy, and design. She works with bodies, metals, and all the feelings that come with a Pisces moon. She is drawn to migration, displacement, disruption, and translation. She sees her process as experimentations where she collaborates with bodies, others, and her own, to un-learn experiences that are rooted in colonial, oppressive, and homogenizing disciplines, and to seek the healing potential in re-connecting with ancestral, spiritual, and bodily intuitions that guide our spatial and emotional movement. Her works have been shown locally and internationally, including producing and production management works at Amant, AFROPUNK 2023, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, The Getty Villa, The Huntington Gardens; performance and video works at Center for Performance Research, LA Performance Practice, REDCAT New Original Works Festival, Hollywood Fringe Festival, Guangdong Museum of Art (China) and Short Film Corner of the 2018 Cannes International Film Festival. She has worked with organizations such as CAP at UCLA, Pieter Performance Space, CalArts Center for New Performance, and The Industry. She is currently the Director of Performance Lab, and a Van Lier Fellow in MITU Theater Hybrid Arts Lab. She received her MFA in Creative Producing and Management at California Institute of the Arts and is currently living in New York.