FLIGHT OF A LEGLESS BIRD
A play by Ethan Luk
Recipient of The Paul Stephen Lim Playwriting Award, Distinguished Achievement at the 2022 Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival
Finalist at the 2023 National Playwrights Conference, Eugene O’Neill Theater Center
Finalist at the 46th Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Playwrights Foundation
Premiered in July 2021 at Lang Yuan Vintage, MCLAB Space, as part of the PRISM Mini Theatre Festival in Beijing; developed through New York Theater Workshop’s Mind the Gap program; funding from The Sam Hutton Fund at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts. Directed by Wilson Wang.
Staged Reading in June 2023 at PAO Arts Center as part of CHUANG Stage’s Found in Translation series. Produced by CHUANG Stage, Asian American Theater Artists of Boston (AATAB), and PAO Arts Center. Directed by Wilson Wang.
Fully-staged production in April 2024 at Berlind Theater, McCarter Theatre Center. Produced by Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University. Directed by Ethan Luk and R.N. Sandberg.
Synopsis: FLIGHT OF A LEGLESS BIRD follows and braids the lives of Robin and Leslie, two queer artists, from the 1980s to the 2000s. Robin, a filmmaker in New York's West Village, confronts the reality of a HIV/AIDS diagnosis, while Leslie, an accomplished Cantopop star and actor, grapples with his personal hurdles in bustling Hong Kong. Their worlds collide by chance, establishing an elusive, emotional bond between the two men that defies time and space. Fusing multiple languages, geographies, and temporalities, the play’s fictional intertwining reflects a desire to forge new queer mythologies and connections, while probing the fraught relationship between art-making and times of societal crisis.
Poster design by Shifan Xue (left), Nina Bhattacharya (center), and Tracy Patterson (right)
Production photos by 阿柔罕 (Beijing, 2021)
Production photos by Viann Wang (Boston, 2023)
Production photos by Daniel Landez (Princeton, 2024)
BUT ME YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN
Choreography by Ethan Luk in collaboration with the dancers
Sound: Sound Construction by Vince di Mura, based on To Those Who Dwelt in a Land of Darkness by zakè and Wayne Robert Thomas, Addendum 1 by zakè and Wayne Robert Thomas, Quartet for the End of Time, V: Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus by Olivier Messiaen, Fratres by Arvo Pärt, Solar by zakè, and The Human Touch by Nina Simone
Light Design: Madeline Best
Costume Design: Mary Jo Mecca
Stage Management: Mary-Susan Gregson and Milan Eldridge
Performed at Hearst Dance Theater, Lewis Arts Complex, Princeton University, February 2024
Dancers: Moses Abrahamson, Julia Chang, Kathy Li, Wasif Sami, Faith Wangermann, Julia Zhou
“but me you have forgotten,” takes its title from a fragment by the Greek poet Sappho, translated by Anne Carson. In the work, dancers encounter and inherit a ciphered map of material and immaterial residues, left behind without returning addresses. Dancers probe the space with forensic curiosity and care, utilizing quotidian objects as prostheses to speculate and etch connections across splintered topographies. The work frames corporeal and performative sites as fugitive archives of touch that dissipate the instance they emerge, but nonetheless resonate in spite of their absence. “but me you have forgotten” amplifies the quieter decibels that transpire in the wake of an event: the affect within the afterparty, the ruminative within the ruins, and the echolalia within the elegy. As the dance progresses, a porous boundary between the live and the dead is drawn. It is increasingly unclear whether the dancers are the remembering or the remembered.
“but me you have forgotten” gazes back at a lineage of texts that trace consonances between the queer body in performance and the queer body in mourning. Inspired by the writing of Joshua Chambers-Letson and Fintan Walsh, the work questions how performance is not only possessed by the past, but carries both the potential for momentary resurrection and the blueprints for new ways of being together. The intertextual backbone of “but me you have forgotten” inscribes the performance space and the body as a stanza: not only as in a poetic unit of time and thought, but as in a room, the private interiors that quiver with the wounds and marginalia of past occupants. “but me you have forgotten” addresses the messy tessellation of memory and epistles scattered across the performance space, and pays homage to the scripts within and around us that await our attunement.
Production photos by Larry Levanti
GALE RENEE / DAVID
Choreographed by Storm Stokes and Ethan Luk
Sound: “Little Dominiques Nosebleed” by The Koreatown Oddity; spoken poetry of Jasmine Mans’ “Black Girl, Call Home”
Dancers: Naomi Benenson, Max Fineman, Annie Leach, Ethan Luk, Camryn Stafford, Storm Stokes
Performed at DRIFT by diSiac Dance Company, Hamilton Murray Theater, Theatre Intime, April 2023
Made to honor the intergenerational persistence of Detroit’s anger, love, and motherhood, GALE RENEE / DAVID is an archive of Stokes and Luk’s first instincts, impulses, and first drafts; as well as a tribute to the personal and generational scripts that form them.
DISORDER: AN IMMERSIVE THEATRICAL INSTALLATION
Conceptualized and designed by Reed Leventis
Directed by Reed Leventis and Ethan Luk
Sound Design by Emily Murray
Visual Art by Juliette Carbonnier and Julia Stahlman
Community-sourced Writing by Dominic Dominguez, Milan Eldridge, Rooya Rahin, Emily Murray, Katie Heinzer, Alexis Maze, Grace Wang, Jennifer Lee, Daniel Viorica, Juliette Carbonnier, Naomi Hess, and other anonymous writers
Performed at Wallace Theater, Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University, February 2023
Highlighting stories and writing sourced from the Princeton University community, DISORDER is a hybrid performance-installation piece that illuminates and investigates the frays and strains of the American medical industry. The installation utilizes audience participation and reflection as a mechanism to reconceptualize spaces of health care as communal sites of radical listening and vulnerability.
Production photos by Hope Van Cleaf
團 | GATHERING
Directed, Filmed, and Edited by Ethan Luk
Choreographed by Ethan Luk in collaboration with the dancers
Produced by diSiac Dance Company, Princeton University
Dancers: Elena Every, Mei Geller, Chandler Jones, Sky Siewe, Storm Stokes, Emma Wang, Sam Yamashita
Winner of Princeton University’s 2023 University Center for Human Values (UCHV) Short Movie Prize
團 | GATHERING is a dance film in conversation with Carrie Mae Weems’ The Kitchen Table Series. Choreography is introduced as a temporal intervention that amplifies the spaces, traces, and resonances between and beyond the photographic tableaux. Located within the formalistic tensions of the memorialization of photography and the disappearance of dance, 團 | GATHERING mediates on the fragmented, recalcitrant processes of remembrance, imagines and physicalizes the lineages beyond the immediately tangible, and thus, reaches to expand notions of togetherness by uplifting the absent.
THE LARAMIE PROJECT
Directed by Ethan Luk
Written by Moisés Kaufman and the members of Tectonic Theater Project
Set Design: Kat McLaughlin
Light Design: Rhim Andemichael
Sound Design: Eliyana Abraham
Dramaturgy: Lara Katz
Stage Management: Giao Vu Dinh, Nicabec Casido
Production Management: Audrey Chau
Performed at Hamilton Murray Theater, Theatre Intime, Princeton University, April 2022
Production photos by Rowen Gesue and Ethan Luk
ORESTES IN THE INTERNET
A one-person play written and performed by Ethan Luk
Inspired by The Oresteia by Aeschylus and Orestes by Euripides
Published in Bridge: The Bluffton University Literary Journal
Synopsis: A contemporary adaptation of the Orestes-Agamemnon story, set in an internet memory space in 2050. Orestes comes to terms with his father’s passing through discovering a collection of unsent letters.
Performed in Gelb Theater, Choate Rosemary Hall, March 2020
Production photos by Kathryn Phillips
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
Choreographed by Ethan Luk
Directed by Tracy Ginder-Delventhal
Performed at Paul Mellon Arts Center, Choate Rosemary Hall, February 2020
THE DINER
A one-act play by Ethan Luk
Directed by Kathryn Phillips
Synopsis: A disillusioned, heartbroken paralegal visits a diner in a dream, encountering a mysterious film projectionist, an old lady, and his ex-lover.
Performed at Choate Fringe Festival, Gelb Theater, February 2020
Production photos by Kathryn Phillips
OCTOPUS | 低頭族
Choreographed by Ethan Luk
Music: Music for 18 Musicians (Section I and Section II) by Steve Reich or Improvisation Sep. 1975 Pt. 2 by Toshi Ichiyanagi; (soundscape changes with each performance)
Recipient of an Award of Artistic Achievement at 92Y’s Dance Up! A National Platform of Emerging Teen Choreographers
Performed at Colony Hall, Choate Rosemary Hall, December 2019
VESSELS
Choreographed by Ethan Luk
Music: Variazione di Un Tango by Dustin O’Halloran
Performed at Choate Rosemary Hall, May 2019
ICARUS
Choreographed by Ethan Luk
Music by Hans Zimmer, Max Richter, and The Cinematic Orchestra
Performed at Paul Mellon Arts Center, Choate Rosemary Hall, March 2019
VOICEMAIL
A one-act play by Ethan Luk
Directed by Wilson Wang
Synopsis: An angel employed in a telephone office in heaven finds out her job is at risk after she discovers that prayers from Earth have not been processed properly.
Performed at Choate Fringe Festival, Gelb Theater, Choate Rosemary Hall, February 2019
Production photos by Ross Mortensen and Wilson Wang
EURYDICE
Directed by Ethan Luk
Written by Sarah Ruhl
Performed at Gelb Theater, Choate Rosemary Hall, January 2019
