CHUANFEST 2026 to Bring Four-Day AAPI Performance Festival to NYC

in-version ensemble will present ChuanFest 2026, a four-day performance festival taking place July 9-12, 2026 across two New York City venues. The festival runs July 9-10 in Manhattan at 150 First Avenue, and July 11-12 in Queens at 3AM Theater. Organized around the Chinese word chuan (船) - 'boat' - as its central theme, the festival gathers AAPI and immigrant artists across theater, movement, and installation to trace the routes of collective passage and memory.

Inspired by Zhang Dai's Night Sailing Boat, an encyclopedic text born from the exchange of knowledge among travelers at sea, ChuanFest stages a space where artists and audiences board together, share what they carry, and set each other forth. Each evening opens and closes with Vanishing (4.0) - Recollection, a durational ritual installation performance by Lisa Virginia and Siyin Yan with in-version ensemble, in which the performance space will be turned into a living, participatory boat growing on the personal objects brought by audiences as they 'board' the boat; a solo performer guides the collective through arrival, witness, and departure across the festival's run.

The festival presents two programs across both venues. Program A features Hamletmachine, Before It Hurts, and I Am That I Am; Program B features Study of Skin, Even Monkeys Fall From Trees, and SeekSaw. Post-show artist conversations follow each evening. The Queens run also includes Vanishing 2.0, a community gathering for AAPI artists conceived by Sydney Yu.

Moving through skin and migration, grief and intimacy, language and inheritance, fate and the compulsive need to know what comes next - all made by AAPI and immigrant artists, held within the ritualistic frame of Vanishing (4.0)'s arrival and departure - ChuanFest refuses the colonial narrative that flattens all immigrant stories into one, and proposes instead diaspora as a plural gathering: partial, accumulative, many voices that do not resolve into each other but travel together.

FESTIVAL LINEUP

Vanishing (4.0)

Recollection Lisa Virginia · Siyin Yan · with in-version ensemble Durational installation and ritual performance, opening and closing each evening

An interactive boat installation and movement piece shaped by audience contribution, Vanishing (4.0) transforms the performance space into an immersive vessel drawing from Chinese mythology and maritime histories. Audience members bring objects, images, or writing from their own creative practices; together with the performer, they generate new meaning in conversation-a meditation on how diaspora creates solidarity in a circumstantial community. Tickets (Manhattan): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1991164039242 Tickets (Queens): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1991169400277

PROGRAM A

Hamletmachine

Conceived, choreographed, and performed by ZIWEI 子维

A solo research-performance that reimagines East German writer Heiner Müller's 1977 Die Hamletmaschine through choreography, projection, sound, and live performance. Moving between dance, experimental theater, and digital media, the work stages a body caught inside historical ruins and contemporary machines-scrolling feeds, ghostly archives, failed revolutions, inherited scripts. Presented at ChuanFest shortly before the artist's departure from New York City, the work carries the charge of leaving: a farewell, a malfunction, and a beginning again. Approx. 50 min. Tickets (Manhattan, Jul 9): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1991161434451 Tickets (Queens, Jul 11): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1991161462535

Before It Hurts

Co-directed by Cerulean Long and Jillian Garibaldi · Performed by Stella Oh and Wisteria Deng

A physical theater duet in seven scenes, each dissecting an intimate relationship formed around the death of another. Devised around a scripted text and structured like a concept album, Before It Hurts presents a visceral navigation of the push and pull across various forms of intimacy and the messiness of grieving. Content notes: death, violence, existential dread. Approx. 50-60 min. Tickets (Manhattan, Jul 9): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1991203764060 Tickets (Queens, Jul 11): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1991161661129

I Am That I Am

Conceived and performed by Hung Ha With opening performance After the Burning by Wisteria Deng, choreographed by Bo Kyung Lee

A choreopoem blending text and movement, I Am That I Am charts a journey from a barren birthplace to a promised land of abundance-navigating love, power, gender, and sex as different identities are forced upon and torn from the performing body. Rooted in the literary tradition of Holy Scripture, the work explores the indistinguishable relationship between worship and performance, asking what theater is if not a tribute to the divine. The evening opens with After the Burning, a poetry and dance hybrid piece about the dull ache of unrequited love-its severance, its aftermath, and what, against all odds, begins again. Approx. 30 min. (preceded by After the Burning, approx. 8 min.) Tickets (Manhattan, Jul 9): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1991161689213 Tickets (Queens, Jul 11): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1991162271956

PROGRAM B

Study of Skin

Conceived and performed by Jane Su (she/her)

A solo lecture performance in which scientific diagrams of dermatitis and the boiling of Chinese herbal medicine coexist onstage, Study of Skin traces the artist's personal lineage of allergy and eczema as both disease and mark-making, asking how the body registers movement across geographies and how skin remembers a life. Inflammatory and self-repairing, skin becomes the work's guide for navigating migration and unfamiliar terrain. Approx. 25-30 min. Tickets (Manhattan, Jul 10): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1991162159620 Tickets (Queens, Jul 12): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1991162534742

Even Monkeys Fall From Trees

Written and performed by Stella Oh (she/her) · Directed by Sari Klainberg

A one-woman show about what it means to be Korean American, as a mother and as a daughter. Through memory, language, and documentary film, Even Monkeys Fall From Trees interrogates how legacy manifests in an Asian American body onstage-how the feelings of cultural identity can seem so close and so far within one's grasp. Approx. 45-60 min. Tickets (Manhattan, Jul 10): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1991162761420 Tickets (Queens, Jul 12): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1991162874759

SeekSaw Conceived and devised by Jieru Wang (she/they)

Transforming the stage into a "meta-lab" of uncertainty, SeekSaw is a participatory game performance inspired by the phenomenon of China's youth using AI chatbots as fortune-tellers. Existential, funny, and sharply devised, the piece explores our craving for omniscience and the desire for control-part philosophical inquiry into fate, part mutual consulting for the anxieties of contemporary life. Approx. 40-50 min. Tickets (Manhattan, Jul 10): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1991163030224 Tickets (Queens, Jul 12): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1991163050284

Vanishing 2.0

Created and performed by Sydney Yu (she/her) Queens evenings only, following post-show conversation

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