SKINLESS
by liqing xu
A Workshop Stage Reading
Directed by Tianding He
Performed at the Pao Arts Center, 99 Albany Street, Boston
Pricing : Free, suggested donation $10
Performance Dates:
Friday, November 17, 2023 - 7PM
Saturday, November 18, 2023 - 2PM + 7PM
Panethnic Pourovers Pop-Up:
Join Panethnic Pourovers, a progressive cultural café library serving AAPI and BIPOC folx for some laid-back coffee, zine-making, and shadow puppet-making good times together!
SKINLESS reimagines the ancient Chinese legend The White Snake as a queer, gender-bending modern fairy tale.
Two snake demons, White and Green, come to Earth to experience being human. White transforms into a human and immediately falls passionately in love, but Green cannot successfully become human. Instead, Green’s soul gets separated from their body, and they are cursed to inhabit different human and non-human bodies. In each new form that Green takes, they chase both White and the recognition of their own carnal desire. Green’s feelings for White become blurred through these experiments with embodiment, and Green gets closer to their true self, which is a self that perhaps does not align with any particular body at all.
Meet the team
liqing xu (Playwright)
Liqing Xu is a playwright and screenwriter. Their work has been developed/presented/supported by Theater Mu, Second Stage, the María Irene Fornés Institute Writers Workshop, The Orchard Project, the Sewanee Writers' Conference (as a Walter E. Dakin Fellow), Breaking the Binary Festival, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, among others. They are a proud inaugural member of the Mu Tang Clan. Currently, she is a 2023-2025 Many Voices Fellow at The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis. BFA: NYU, Film and Television. MFA: Hunter College, Playwriting. Born and raised in Northern California, they are often between Los Angeles and New York.
Tianding He (Director)
Tianding He, originally from China, is an experimental theatre director, playwright, multidisciplinary artist, and arts leader based in New York City. She is the founding artistic director of B·O·N·D International Virtual Performance Festival, an arts leader of NYFA’s Incubator for Arts & Culture Leaders of Color, and a SDC associate member. Her work, an authentic exploration of societal phenomena, is a testament to her dedication to unveiling lesser-known realities. She was a resident artist of Object Movement Residency, Orchard Project Performance Lab, Dumbo Six Foot Platform, and Observership recipient of Stage Director and Choreographer Foundation and Green Theatre Grant winner. She received her first MA in Performance Studies from NYU, a second master’s degree in Theatre of Hunter College, and PhD from UC Irvine and UC San Diego.
This event is part of
FOUND IN TRANSLATION
Found in Translation is a collaboration between Asian American Theatre Artists of Boston (AATAB), CHUANG Stage, and Pao Arts Center. Since 2021, Found in Translation amplifies the power and complexities of being multilingual, immigrants, or identifying as Asian American in Greater Boston; these performances connect the pan-Asian community through conversations about race, language, identity, and our experiences when it comes to belongings and a collective more just future.
The Found in Translation Series is supported by the New England Foundation for the Arts' Public Art for Spatial Justice program, with funding from the Barr Foundation.
