Hi I’m 채송
You can learn about the origin and sound of my name through this online dictionary.
I am a theater director and educator. I wrestle with the concept of "kind rage." It is a practice, tendency, and sentiment that recontextualizes inherited and embodied pain to build communal, imaginative, and rebellious spaces. These are manifested through an interdisciplinary emphasis on the body and its site. I seek joy and empowerment through togethering: affording each other a space to notice, cherish, celebrate, let go, and archive our shared and disparate kind rage.
With this emphasis on building connections within and across communities, I make performances of a wide variety from new plays, reinterpretation of canons, musicals, dance-theater, and performance art to documentary-, immersive-, interactive-, site-specific, devised-, and other interdisciplinary works. I often gravitate towards narratives and histories of immigration, diaspora, alienation, solidarity, nation/state identity, war, and transgenerational gift and trauma.
What stays constant as I traverse through these disciplines and topics is my passion for telling the stories of traveling bodies in the in-between spaces, somatic impact of colonization, and how all of these intersect with the feminine and queer gaze.
Currently, I work as the Commissioned Artist and Interim Education Manager at Pink Fang (formerly Ping Chong and Company). With Pink Fang, I am devising the twelfth iteration of an intermedia project, She Walks the Air, co-instructing the Multicultural Theater Performance course at Hunter College, and facilitating New York City Public School Professional Development workshops.
As a scholar, writer, and educator, I have written for The Korean Theatre Review, spoken for The Korea Theatre Association’s seminar, co-created the Hidden Voices: AAPI Experience - Documentary Theater in the style of Pink Fang (Formerly Ping Chong and Company) curriculum for NYCPS, and taught 17 classrooms across the Metropolitan New York Area of Secret Histories Arts-in Education program, including for New Jersey Performing Arts Center and International School Theatre Association. I’m also a proud member of the Leon Levy Foundation Roundabout Directors Group — Cohort 6 and an Associate Member of the SDC.
I owe so much of what I practice to the visionary artists I got to perform for including Ping Chong, Okwui Okpokwasili, Samita Sinha, Claire Chase, and Constellation Chor, with/for whom I got to be in spaces including La MaMa, Danspace, The Kitchen, Mercury Store, National Sawdust, Judson and Biophony - Metropolis Ensemble. Thanks to them, I see through Deep Listening, listen through Contact Improvisation, and hear through Kinesthetic Awareness. I am also grateful for opportunities I had to synthesize my inspirations through scholarships and residencies from LMCC, New York State Council on the Arts, Bearnstow, and Seoul Dance Center; as well as Columbia University, where I graduated with an MFA in Theater Directing.