Artistic Statement
As a mainly playwright but also poet and fiction writer, as a native speaker in Chinese but also an English and German speaker, I’m interested in finding connections between genres, languages, and cultures that inform each other. It’s my opinion that, in the present globalized world, every story doesn’t happen in one place but across cultures, time and space. To understand why an American small-town struggles, you have to look at the poems by an overworked Chinese worker seeking suicide. I want to create theater and a new language that belongs to, explains, and changes our global community. Also, I have a strong interest in writing plays in verse or poetic dramas, because I found they are two sides of the same coin: Aristotle’s classic text on tragedy is called Poetics. Most theater over time and across culture from Sophocles, Moliere, Shakespeare, Schiller to Li Yu are written in verse. So it’s my mission to revive the form of poetic drama and adapt it for the present day context and audience. I want to write about diversity without appealing to exotic rituals. I want to write about the environment without romanticizing an apocalyptic world.
←
Yide(John) Cai
Artistic Statement
As a mainly playwright but also poet and fiction writer, as a native speaker in Chinese but also an English and German speaker, I’m interested in finding connections between genres, languages, and cultures that inform each other. It’s my opinion that, in the present globalized world, every story doesn’t happen in one place but across cultures, time and space. To understand why an American small-town struggles, you have to look at the poems by an overworked Chinese worker seeking suicide. I want to create theater and a new language that belongs to, explains, and changes our global community. Also, I have a strong interest in writing plays in verse or poetic dramas, because I found they are two sides of the same coin: Aristotle’s classic text on tragedy is called Poetics. Most theater over time and across culture from Sophocles, Moliere, Shakespeare, Schiller to Li Yu are written in verse. So it’s my mission to revive the form of poetic drama and adapt it for the present day context and audience. I want to write about diversity without appealing to exotic rituals. I want to write about the environment without romanticizing an apocalyptic world.