FLIGHT OF A LEGLESS BIRD

A play by Ethan Luk

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.

University full 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 late 1980s to the early 2000s. Robin, a filmmaker in New York’s West Village, confronts the reality of a HIV/AIDS diagnosis; Leslie, a Cantopop star and actor, grapples with his personal hurdles and newfound fame in Hong Kong. Robin’s and Leslie’s worlds collide by chance, establishing an emotional bond between the two men that defies time and space. A play told in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, Flight probes the fraught entanglement of artmaking and societal crisis, while illuminating the enduring forms of relation forged across the imagination, media, continents, and bodies of water.

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)

Princeton Production Credits

Set Design: Wesley Cornwell / Projection Design: Daniel Landez / Lighting Design: Kerstin Fagerstrom / Costume Design: Mel Ng / Sound Design: Nathan Leigh / Stage Managers: Emily Yang, Giao Vu Dinh, Molly Lopkin, Jackie Qin

BUT ME YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN

Choreography by Ethan Luk in collaboration with the dancers
Sound 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. In the work, dancers encounter and inherit a landscape of material and immaterial residues. 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.

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

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

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, 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

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, 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, 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

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, December 2019

VESSELS

Choreographed by Ethan Luk
Music: Variazione di Un Tango by Dustin O’Halloran

ICARUS

Choreographed by Ethan Luk
Music by Hans Zimmer, Max Richter, and The Cinematic Orchestra

Performed at Paul Mellon Arts Center, 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, February 2019

Production photos by Ross Mortensen and Wilson Wang

EURYDICE

Directed by Ethan Luk
Written by Sarah Ruhl

Performed at Gelb Theater, January 2019