Culinary Theatrical Experience VANISHING 2.0 to Premiere At LimeFest at The Tank

in-version ensemble will present Vanishing 2.0, an interactive, culinary theatrical experience making its New York premiere at The Tank's LimeFest on August 6th. A reimagining of the award-winning Vanishing from Edinburgh Fringe, this new version brings object and game theater into the kitchen, drawing audiences into a playful, chaotic, and nostalgic world of community bonding and cross-cultural cooking.

Inspired in part by the repetitive patterns of our everyday rituals, Vanishing 2.0 invites the audience to cook three dishes - be they delicious, bizarre, or reminiscent of home. The experience draws on the expansive psychological arc attached to our physical actions, the narrative potential everyday objects contain, and the process of actively grasping the sense of existence through creating, making, and imagining.

When the strangeness of the drifting present begins to swallow the self once anchored in memory, or when the disorientation becomes coils tight around the alienated body, foreign thought, fragmented speech - what does it mean to live within, or beyond, the entanglement of vanishing and being trapped? As "cultural outsiders", when our identity is always somewhere in between, or not enough, how can we grasp and ground our existence?

Devised by Jieru Wang and Ruby Wang, Vanishing 2.0 invites audience members not only to watch, but to join in - stepping onstage to cook alongside the performer, Sydney (Jiani) Yu, in a theatrical event that blurs the line between ritual, game, and shared meal. Under the direction of Cerulean Long, this experience transforms the stage into a lively, intimate kitchen where memory surfaces through touch, smell, and taste. Set and props, designed by Nora Iammarino, playfully activate the everyday tools of cooking as storytelling devices, while Carolyn Kelly's responsive sound environment and Annabelle Mei's fluid lighting scheme shift in rhythm with the action, immersing participants in a constantly evolving sensory world. Jane Su's live camera design captures the cooking in real time, juxtaposing the immediacy of the event with layers of distance and spectacles. Stage managed by Mia Harada, the production turns the familiar act of preparing food into an unexpected site of connection, performance, and cultural trace. In Vanishing 2.0, theater becomes a space of gathering, the kitchen becomes the stage, and each dish becomes a portal to memory, migration, and the unspoken stories we carry.

Nominated by the Asian Arts Award at the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe and acclaimed by China Daily and BroadwayWorld, the Vanishing series embodies in-version ensemble's mission to redefine center and periphery, continuously reimagining theatrical form and challenging conventional storytelling. Audiences have described it as "an extraordinarily moving show that invoked questions so deep I felt like sitting naked in front of a mirror," and celebrated its "powerful nuggets constantly flashing and gorgeous alignment of culture."

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