Show Us How to Live

Thank you for the introduction, legend Carmelita. Bold and fearless, in all the terror of a life in art making, Carmelita. I keep thinking about the last moment of your last show. The way you remembered those we have lost and their legacy. Thank you for your legacy. We just celebrated the legacy of Morgan Jenness and Philip Arnoult, who both tangibly and spiritually changed my life. We are breathing together here in Mark Russell’s legacy which will also be Meropi Peponides and Kaneza Schaal’s legacy.

Legacy is also what we, the Artistic Leadership Team at Ping Chong and Company (PCC) are tasked to carry through. In doing so, we are asking ourselves these four questions:

Why do we exist? 
How do we continue? 
What do we hold onto? 
When do we let go?

I first met Ping Chong through Anne Bogart, who matched him for me as a mentor on a grad school project. I was immersive-ly theatricalizing an essay by Chinese dissident poet Liao Yiwu. The poem is called “19” published in the Paris Review, in which he recalls the visceral experiences of nineteen June 4th’s beginning with 1989. On that day, he wrote “Massacre,” a poem in response to the Tiananmen protests, for which he was then arrested and detained for four years in a hard labor camp.

As a mentor, Ping was truly a match made in heaven for me. An artist whose generative work weaves disparate histories to find new connective tissue to understand the human condition. An artist who is utterly Asian and also unbound by Asianness, and who has limitless curiosity and capacity for listening and supporting people in sharing their lived experiences. In him, I found a north star. A north star who had the vision and support of a navigator like Bruce Allardice, who built PCC with him for fifty years. I remember longing, where’s my Bruce?

In 2023, when I was invited to join PCC upon Ping and Bruce’s retirement, I candidly asked, “Why is the company continuing?” and shared my opinion that if we don’t come to a pertinent reason of why we should exist beyond Ping, that “shutting it down” should be a possibility.

Soon after, I went to see PCC’s Undesirable Elements: Ukraine, at the Ukrainian Museum in the East Village, where Ukrainians and Ukrainian Americans told their personal stories collectively, weaving an extraordinary quilt that bound the war closer to us because we were listening to our neighbors. I remember thinking that PCC should continue, if only for this.

And, in the year and a half since I joined the company, that list of reasons has grown to include the intentional and collective organizational visioning; the Undesirable Elements community engaged practices in community and classroom; our collaborations with Diana Oh; Talvin Wilks’ project on Maria Ressa and the fragility of democracy; and Nile Harris’s explosively provocative works, such as This House is Not a Home, minor b, and Temporary Boyfriend with Malcolm-x Betts.

There are abundant reasons why we should exist.

But how do we continue? What do we hold onto? And is it even possible to hold onto what is ephemeral?

I would be happy if we continue to be curious about the rights of every human being in the world, and our humanity, and the loss of humanity in this time. -Ping Chong

We asked Ping what he wanted for the future of Ping Chong and Company. His words to us were:

I’m done. Feel free to be yourselves with your own vision. It’s a vessel for artists at a time where it’s so difficult to be at home. I would be happy if we continue to be curious about the rights of every human being in the world, and our humanity, and the loss of humanity in this time. That’s what matters to me.

Now that’s a north star. 

I wish for you all a north star who can show you the way of when and how to let go. Ping letting go after fifty years, in a most generous act of actually letting go, has meant that we get the freedom to ask and answer these questions for ourselves. We are not participating in hagiography. We get to define what the legacy is, and to become the legacy, with the extraordinary gift of a company that originated in an artist’s unique impulse: from any source, to many streams, towards which ocean calls. 

This PCC vessel is a place where I can make work at the intersection of artistic, civic, and contemplative practice. My central artistic question in my current work is, “how do we move from consumption to communion?” I found a source at a retreat at Mount Tremper Zen Monastery. Oryoki, translated as “just enough,” is a highly choreographed meal ritual that asks the participant, who is served a meal, to only ask for what you need. And it might result in public humiliation if greedy fuckers take more, because there is no moment in this highly choreographed silent ritual to empty your bowl into the trash. When you come to the end of the meal, the bowl is wiped clean with bread, then washed with green tea that is drunk, and then wiped dry by the very cloth it had come wrapped in. No waste, each grain of rice accounted for. 

This practice is the seed of the next work I want to make. So when the opportunity of our annual event came, where we gather with our community, share artistry and break bread, I thought, let’s roll the workshop budget into this event budget, and we adapted this meal practice for ourselves. Sara Zatz, in her twenty-eight years of working at PCC, helped me to curate the performers of the ritual: a beautiful cross-section of staff, leadership, former casts, current teaching artists, and even board members.

The artistic leadership team, including our managing director Jane Jung (who was then eight months pregnant), helped wrap 150 coconut shell bowls with cloth napkins. Two hours before the event started, I served all the performers with the meal ritual. After eating in silence, they each shared how they came to PCC, and the refrain I heard again and again was “being a part of that changed my life.” That table contained so much history, so much legacy of service into artistic expression that materially and spiritually shifted each life. Ping was not there at that table, but Ping was there at that table.

The rehearsal room is that table. The board meeting is that table. This symposium is that table, where we can ask, must ask:

Why do we exist? 
How do we continue? 
What do we hold onto?
When do we let go?

We know who is being targeted, but not when the rest of us will be added to that list. And we will be. What will we need? Can the theatre offer practices to survive?

And now you are all in my existential crisis...I’m sorry. You’re welcome. So, 2025. We know what is coming, but we don’t know what will happen. We know who is being targeted, but not when the rest of us will be added to that list. And we will be. What will we need? Can the theatre offer practices to survive?

The Natyashastra, the Sanskrit treatise on the performing arts, tells us that theatre can suspend us from the ordinary world and transfer us to a parallel reality of wonder, where the inner state is transformed and our souls are shifted to a higher consciousness. We have inherited the legacy of a form that can do this, if our practice of it is in alignment with that purpose. Our art is not only able to reveal the way the world works. It can show us how to live. We can do this. Thank you.