Live Performance by Chinese Theatre Works
Thursday, August 8, 11:30pm – 12am | Broadway between 45th & 46th Sts

Enjoy a special presentation of Mulan featuring a live performance by Chinese Theatre Works on Thursday August 8, beginning at 11:30pm. This 15-minute traditional Chinese operatic program features selections from Drunken Beauty, Dance of the Green Snake, and Sun Wukong — the "Monkey King,” performed by Yonghong Jia, Huixin Bai and Yulin Fang. The evening will culminate with Chun Hua Catherine Dong's Mulan as it appears on 95+ surrounding billboards in Times Square from 11:57pm to 12am.

A video-based work created through virtual reality, Chun Hua Catherine Dong’s Mulan reimagines the legendary Chinese folk heroine of the same name to explore gender and the plasticity and plurality of the body. Inspired by ancient Chinese storytelling, performance traditions, and marine biology, Dong used 3D VR tools to create an imaginary aquatic fantasy world where Mulan disguises her identity and gender, in order to coexist and become one with the nudibranch — a colorful deep-sea organism with striking forms, unique defenses, and ambiguous gender identities. Ultimately Mulan becomes not only a hybrid being, but a part of the surrounding marine ecosystems. Donning the protagonist in a colorful Beijing Opera costume and staging her on the rainbow-hued nudibranch, Dong proposes the pluralities within this folk character, and challenges historically male-dominated theater traditions.

Mulan was created in collaboration with Kudo Albus, a digital artist in Shanghai.

“Through performative gestures and expressions, I re-interpret Mulan from a feminist perspective. This work also raises questions about the binary system, about how to merge the boundaries of self/other, culture/nature, and human/animal, creating a new social relation that supports different ways of living and diverse beings in order to sustain and survive.” — Chun Hua Catherine Dong