Gay photographer-storyteller to explore China at PuSh Festival

Gay Chinese-Australian performer William Yang, maybe best known for his award-winning autobiographical documentary Sadness about his Chinese heritage and the effect of the AIDS epidemic on Sydney's gay community, will bring his latest work, China, to the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in February.

Born in Australia, Yang captured the images and video for this show during four trips to China between 1989 and 2005 in a land that he never knew.  Through his words and images Yang explores the tremendous social changes, including those towards homosexuality, which unfolded during that time.

During one of those trips Yang travelled as part of a cultural exchange between Adelaide’s Flinders University and the Shanghai Theatre Company.  There he performed an excerpt of his show Friends of Dorothy in a forum which is thought to the first ever public discussion of homosexuality in China.

China marks Yang’s ninth monologue with slide projection performance since he started them back in 1989.  As a form of performance theatre, this has become Yang’s favoured way of showing his skills as a writer and visual artist.

China
2-6 February 2010 @ 7:30pm
Frederic Wood Theatre, University of British Columbia

A charismatic yet stoic storyteller, Yang humorously narrates his journey from the streets of Beijing, where electronics superstores jostle with echoes of the Cultural Revolution and the Ming Dynasty, to the sacred mountain Huang Shan. Yang’s wryly sensitive perspective, his eye for detail, and his arresting projected images come together withNicholas Ng’s haunting live score for the erhu (Chinese violin) and pipa (Chinese lute) in an unforgettable theatrical experience.

Tickets are $24-$30 each available by calling the Theatre UBC box office at 604.822.2678.  Visit http://www.pushfestival.ca for more information.