The Theatre Centre Presents NO FOREIGNERS

After a hugely successful run in 2018, and a multi-city tour, NO FOREIGNERS returns to THE THEATRE CENTRE this September. A collaboration between ground-breaking Vancouver interdisciplinary super group Hong Kong Exile and Governor General's award-winning playwright David Yee of fu-GEN Theatre, NO FOREIGNERS is a multimedia performance that meditates on North American Chinese shopping malls as spaces of cultural creation and clash. Multiple storylines begin in a mall and quickly diverge-catapulting the audience across cities, between Cantonese and English, in and out of the afterlife, through the past, present, and future.

"We're creating new mythologies with the work, and I think that's what people leave the show with" says writer and fu-GEN Artistic Director David Yee. "Thanks to the digital apparatus, we're able to combine myth and realism together in ways that are often elusive in live performance. A large part of any culture is the expression of it through lore, myths, folktales... and this is sort of a hyper-modernized version of those expressions."

NO FOREIGNERS will kick off THE THEATRE CENTRE's 2019/20 programming. "We are very excited to be presenting NO FOREIGNERS" commented THE THEATRE CENTRE's Artistic Director, Aislinn Rose. "The whole team here fell in love with the show last year, and any time fu-GEN is in the building is a good time. I'm also looking forward to continuing our relationship with Hong Kong Exile; we're super excited by the work they are creating, and I love the values from which they create that work."

Weaving together text, miniatures, digital backdrops and live cameras, NO FOREIGNERS examines our changing relationships to these social spaces and the histories, characters, experiences, and ephemera that keep inviting us back.

"Extending from our experiences as Chinese diaspora, having grown up within and around these malls, we're trying to re-imagine what these spaces have been for us, how they've supported older generations, and how they are changing" says director, designer, and Hong Kong Exile Co-Artistic Director, Milton Lim. "Beyond the bubble waffles, the cheap electronics, the incense, the action figures, the travel agencies, the sponge cakes, the karaoke places-there's much more than the sum of the parts."

THE THEATRE CENTRE is a nationally recognized live-arts incubator that serves as a research and development hub for the cultural sector. They are a public space, open and accessible to the people of our community, where citizens can imagine, debate, celebrate, protest, unite and be responsible for inventing the future. theatrecentre.org

HONG KONG EXILE is an interdisciplinary arts company led by Vancouver-based artists: Natalie Tin Yin Gan, Remy Siu, and Milton Lim. They value investigation of cultural politics in an era of globalization, inclusion of under-represented experiences and identities, and are committed to exploring multi-media innovation and integration with live performance. hongkongexile.com

fu-GEN THEATRE is dedicated to the development of professional Asian Canadian theatre artists through the production of new and established works. They serve the Asian Canadian theatre artist, are dedicated to exploring the underlying Asian Canadian story, and believe in diversity of practice: using non-traditional space, time, methodology & philosophy. fu-gen.org

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