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
This show includes incense and fog.

Xiaoyue Zhang: Braiding Water

This performance is apart of The Exponential Festival.

Created and Performed by Xiaoyue Zhang
Co-directed by Brittney Brady, Xiaoyue Zhang
Dramaturg by Brittney Brady Lighting
Design & Creative Technical Collaboration by Kelley Shih
Produced by Xiaoyue Zhang, Esmé Maria Ng

Braiding Water is a tender exploration of grief and a reimagining of mourning practices for unnamed losses and the dead who could not be honored.

"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. Merging technology with Traditional Chinese Massage therapy, I delve into the somatic relics of grief, seeking to understand the rituals and physical actions that accompany emotional processing.​"

"My aim is to unearth the somatic remnants of unexpressed grief within my body. By merging the playfulness of technology with the familiarity of Traditional Chinese Massage therapy, I delve into the somatic relics of grief. Through repetitive actions, I seek a sense of ritual, striving to understand the needs of those in mourning. What physical actions accompany emotional processing, and what is released through this energetic accumulation?"

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."

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.