We are very pleased to announce that our committee has selected Sattva as GYACD's inaugural signature production, to be staged in late 2024.
Proposed by Annie Wu, GYACD's High School Representative, Sattva is inspired by a hair embroidery of Guanyin 觀音 (Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva) by the Yuan Dynasty poet and painter Guan Daosheng 管道昇 (1262-1319). Narrated through the voice of a high school girl, this production explores the creative plight of female artists like Guan Daosheng in late imperial China, who resorted to devotion, rituals, and unorthodox art forms (such as hair embroidery) for their artistic and personal expressions, as their works were especially prone to loss and misattribution. Women writers' works barely survived in Guan's time (like her calligraphy) while the existing ones are often attributed to their husbands (like her acclaimed ink paintings). The Guanyin hair embroidery, however, is widely believed to be Guan's work because of its feminine form of embroidery and its blatant non-literati foreign traits of Buddhism.
Through this lens, this production also examines the intercultural quality of the figure of Guanyin, who emerged as a male Bodhisattva in the South Asian Buddhist traditions but morphed into a female icon in East Asia worshipped by many women who felt out of place in the Confucianist social order in the early modern era.
This production draws inspiration from many theater traditions, including Chinese shadow puppetry and Japanese Bunraku puppet theater.
Yiwen Wu, a PhD student at the University of Chicago specializing in premodern East Asian theater and cross-cultural performance, will direct the production and co-write the script with Annie Wu. Yimei Zhu, an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores senses, posthumanism, and perspective transformation, will serve as the visual supervisor and puppet maker. Rudradutt Ranade, a multidisciplinary artist working across writing, film, illustration, photography, and printmaking, will serve as the animator. Aaron Huang, a scholar of late imperial Chinese opera and global music theory, will be the sound designer and live musician for the production.
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