Xiangyi Tan
Xiangyi's work embraces the textual, choreographic and rhythmic impulses of taking theatre in space and cinema in frames of (re)presentation, montage, and temporal fractures. Her artistic life is in tune with her performance life: allowing herself to be in conversation with the monumental, collective imaginations as well as the lyrical, spiritual unknowns seeping through her body and voice. She blends intimate narratives with interdisciplinary modes of performance making, inspired by dreamscape, dance, soundscape, imageries across temporalities, diasporas and memories. Her aesthetic is heightened and experiential, marked by moments of grounding and rupture.
trailer to “Dad is Coming to See my Show, and I said No.”
《爸爸要来看我的演出，我拒绝了》预告片
Short Film, 4K, Guangzhou, China, 2022 (in post production)
Written and directed by Xiangyi Tan
Cinematography by Hui Chen (Dream Speaking, 2018, Locarno Film Festival, Pardi di Domani)
The day when she is about to perform the role that she’s been rehearsing for weeks, her father visits her from abroad. When he arrives in Guangzhou, she accepts what their reunion brings to her as they roam around the colonial traces of this city. Something strange takes over her, and she lives in the pulse of her own bodily experience.
Barn Burning
Adapted from Haruki Murakami's short story 'Barn Burning'
WG Studio RADA, London 2022
A poetic aesthetic and storytelling, subverting a representational theatrical framework that reproduces the feminine body. A theatre of affect in performance, blurring the boundaries between the corporeal and self. An embodiment that is impossible to reconcile, questioning mimetic representation of feminine subjectivity, transgressing representational borders, bridging drama, dance and performance art.
Flee and Engulfed
《逃离与环绕》
Xiangyi is the producer and co-writer of 'Flee and Engulfed,' commissioned by BBH Black Sheep Studio, as a winner of BBH's 'Differently Does It' Award.
Short Film, Zhanjiang, China, 2023
A vision from a seaside engineer leads people who are having the same dream every night into a realm where their dream and memory are confused. Whilst the theatre stages dreams from people’s memories, a voice leads us to the truth as the engineer disappears into a new dream of difference.
inspired by
marguerite duras 'malady of death'
'you ask how the emotion of loving can happen. she answers, perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of universe. through a mistake. never through an act of will. it can come from anything, from the flight of a night bird, from a sleep, from a dream of sleep, from the approach of death, from a word, from a crime, of itself, from oneself, often without knowing how.'
Premiere Screening at BFI London: press