Please join us for a conversation with theatre-artist Alice Canton to discuss OTHER [ōtepoti chinese] on its final day of exhibition at Blue Oyster Art Project Space. The exhibition investigates the experiences of Chinese people in Ōtepoti, asking what it means to be Chinese— ethnically, culturally and socially—here and now.
Past Event
OTHER [ōtepoti chinese] forms part of a wider performance project, OTHER [chinese], creating space for multiple voices to arise because being Chinese, and being Chinese in Aotearoa, is not one, singular thing. This iteration of the project has included storytelling workshops for participants to connect to other identities within the Chinese diaspora born here and across the Asia-Pacific region.
These experiences and their narrators are to be woven into a live, documentary theatre production in which audiences access, visibly and audibly, the rich continuum of perspectives held by Chinese in Aotearoa—placing ‘old migrants’ (those whose ancestral line trace back to the goldmines) alongside ‘new migrants’ (those recently moved to Aotearoa). It is expected this documentary theatre production will be developed for presentation in Ōtepoti in 2020.
Alice Canton
Alice Canton is an award-winning theatre-artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau, and a graduate of Toi Whakaari: NZ Drama School (2012) and University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts (2008). Her collective practice, White_mess, is an open structure concerned with developing interdisciplinary performance practice and live experiences for audiences, ranging from large-scale community engagement projects to site-specific activation and improvisation. Recent works include: Children Talk About (Auckland Arts Festival, 2018); OTHER [chinese] (2017); Dance Like Everybody’s Watching (Auckland Theatre Company, 2017); ORANGUTAN (2015); Do Not Touch The Exhibition (The Court Theatre, 2014); THRIFTSHOP (New Zealand Improv Festival, 2013).