TABLE SESSIONS: MEL HSU
GREAT PERFORMANCES. GREAT FOOD. GREAT CONVERSATION. aND YOU.
photo: kenzi crash
Thursday, JanUARY 19 AT 7 PM
FRIDAY, JanUARY 20 AT 7 PM
SATURDAY, JanUARY 21 AT 7 PM
Asian Arts Initiative, 1219 Vine Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107
Letters to the Moon, a soundbath in honor of those who made me
Mel Hsu invites you to be still, close your eyes, take slower breaths and let sound wash over you. Mel’s Table Session, Letters to the Moon, is an evening of sound collages featuring ethereal cello, haunting vocals, projected images, fragments of familial interviews and stories told across splintered languages. Join us for the performance, and dinner from Shanghai1 afterwards (included in your ticket price).
Performed by Mel Hsu
In collaboration with visual artist Bz Zhang
Directed by Cat Ramirez
Co-Presented with Asian Arts Initiative
A note to attendees: While there will be chairs available for everyone, attendees are welcome to bring comfortable mats, pillows, or blankets if the attendee would prefer to experience the performance lying down or reclining.
photo: kenzi crash
“Letters to the Moon is a tender revisiting. A re-writing of memory in companionship with visual artist Bz Zhang, my childhood best friend and co-conspirator in imagination. To intertwine my past and present communities by inviting in the brilliant direction of Cat Ramirez.
Thank you for being here with me. For bearing witness. For honoring those who built me.
”
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The island of Taiwan has been passed between the hands of different global powers for centuries. While several generations of my family all grew up on the same land, the multiple shifts between Chinese, Dutch and Japanese governments caused the land and the lives upon it to be completely re-coded with new languages, cultural expectations and history class curriculums every few decades.
Multiple generations of Taiwanese and Indigenous people were forced to speak a new language with the entrance of a new government. Depending on who was in power, native tongues were relegated to being spoken only at home and forbidden to be spoken in public.
A decade ago, I embarked on a journey of exploring the impact of linguistic colonization within four generations of my family. My great-grandparents’ first words were in Taiwanese. My grandmother writes her poetry in Japanese, my parents dream in Mandarin. My sister and I are schooled in English grammar.
For one year, I conducted interviews with my grandmothers, my parents, and my sister. My original hypothesis was a condemnation of the ways in which colonization causes intergenerational rupture. I was grieving and angry. I wanted to be able to read my grandmother’s poetry - I felt that war, foreign occupation and white supremacy had stripped me of that sacred privilege.
Through the interview process, what was illuminated for me was the underground ecosystem of linguistic myselia that my family created for ourselves when we were stripped of words. What I found was resistance - we reached for one another despite having different vocabularies. We created our own languages, stronger languages, languages of family that no government could take away from us. The sharing of food, of music, of touch, of play, of grief, of migration, of dreams.
What I found was that my grandmother grew into Mandarin alongside my mother, my mother grows into English alongside me. We create our own familial vocabularies alongside each other. Our mothers grow to find us in our mother tongues.
Keeping Voices was the collection of a summer’s work, a year’s interviews, two years of focused thought, several more years’ grief of not knowing my family’s history, a lifetime of Chinese sounds hidden in my mouth.
Ten years later, when Intercultural Journeys reached out to me, I felt moved to revisit this piece. To listen back to the interviews for the first time. To conduct new ones. To breathe life back into the soundwaves that transformed me. To cradle myself in the voice of my paternal grandmother, who has since passed away. To remember the woman who was the only person in my life who called me by my Chinese name. To honor the people who dreamt across oceans and dared to build new homes.
Letters to the Moon is a tender revisiting. A re-writing of memory in companionship with visual artist Bz Zhang, my childhood best friend and co-conspirator in imagination. To intertwine my past and present communities by inviting in the brilliant direction of Cat Ramirez.
Thank you for being here with me. For bearing witness. For honoring those who built me.
photo: kenzi crash
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Mel Hsu is a sonic painter of impossible worlds. As a multi-instrumentalist, Mel often ventures from her classical roots as a cellist into unexpected, cross-disciplinary collaborations. Rooted in Philadelphia, Mel’s restless spirit finds adventure across time zones and oceans as musical and administrative support for others who inspire her. Mel is a spreadsheet nerd, a slow reader, and a shameless instigator of kitchen dance parties. www.melaniehsu.com
photo: kenzi crash
Know Before the Show
THE MEAL
Dinner from Shanghai1 will be provided as part of the ticket price, and will be served after the performance. A menu will be available before and during the show, and will include vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free options.
Accessibility
The performance event will take place indoors in Asian Arts Initiative’s Black Box Theater. AAI’s entrance is ADA accessible by ramp or 2 short steps to the front door of the building. The gallery and theater entrance is through a door on the left, just inside of the main entrance. There is level flooring through the first floor of the building. Restrooms are accessible and all-gender.
Covid Policy
For this indoor IJ event, we require audiences to wear a mask throughout the duration of the performance and talkback segments of the evening.
Audience members may choose to have dinner after the performance in the theater or take dinner to go, according to personal preferences.
If dining in, we encourage mask wearing when not actively eating or drinking.
IJ is committed to holding our community in care, and asks you to hold the community in care as well; we encourage testing before attendance in the event of known exposure. We also ask audiences to stay home if they test positive for COVID or are experiencing any illness, and we have a full-refund policy in the case of illness.
We continue to follow City of Philadelphia and CDC guidelines, and thus this policy may change. If you have any questions about the policy, please reach out to info@interculturaljourneys.org or call us at 267-753-0757.
MEET THE ARTIST TEAM
Bz (b. 1991, USA) is a visual artist, architect, organizer, and educator based on Tongva land (Los Angeles, USA). They are a core organizer with the Design As Protest Collective and Dark Matter University. They received a Master of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Visual Arts from Brown University, and they are a licensed architect in the state of California.
Cat Ramirez (they/he/she) is an award-winning Philly-based theatre director and performance producer. They love giant logistical puzzles, community meals, and bisexual lighting. Recent collaborations include Villanova University, Temple University, Asian Arts Initiative, Philly Young Playwrights, PlayPenn, Lxs Primxs, Theatre Exile, and Hedgerow Theatre Company. Cat currently serves as the Creative Director for Philadelphia Asian Performing Artists (PAPA), the Staff Producer for the Bearded Ladies Cabaret, and a board member for the Stockton Rush Bartol Foundation. He is a worker-owner of interactive performance cooperative, Obvious Agency and is an alumni of the National New Play Network’s Producer-In-Residence Program. Her work has been recognized by the Pennsylvania Commission on Asian Pacific American Affairs. catramirez.com
What is a Table Session?
It's a gathering. A place of exchange. A time to be still and listen or get up and dance. To eat delicious food. To connect with other people about art, food, and life. Intercultural Journeys is bringing artists and audiences around the table, sharing a special moment with friends and strangers across the city and working to rekindle our connections to one another.
Three curators, Solomon Temple (October 2022), Mel Hsu (January 2023), and Ximena Violante (April 2023) lead the sessions. Each with their own story, each with their own musical language to share, and each with a different cuisine to explore and enjoy. Join us around the table all throughout the season.
With Thanks
Lead support for The Table Sessions is provided by the William Penn Foundation.
The Table Sessions: Mel Hsu is co-presented by Asian Arts Initiative. Asian Arts Initiative is a community-based arts center in Philadelphia that engages artists and everyday people to create art that explores the diverse experiences of Asian Americans, addresses our social context, and imagines and effects positive community change. Learn more about AAI’s past and current programming and exhibitions at www.asianartsinitiative.com.