Hi I’m 채송
You can learn about the origin and sound of my name through this online dictionary.
I make performances of a wide variety from new plays, reinterpretation of canons, musicals, dance-theater, performance art, new media, to other interdisciplinary works. What stays constant as I traverse through theese disciplines is my passion for telling the stories of traveling bodies in the in-between spaces, somatic reality of transgenerational memories of war and colonization, and how all of these intersect with the feminine and queer gaze.
I wrestle with the concept of "kind rage." It is a practice, tendency, and sentiment that recontextualizes inherited and embodied pain into taking care, allowing time, and creating braver and safer spaces that my dear friend and brilliant dramaturg, Andrew Agress named.
Within such communal, imaginative, and rebellious work, I seek to share stories that fall through boundaries, and hope to find joy and empowerment through togethering – utilizing somatic, dramatic and interdisciplinary practices. I work with stories, objects, bodies, voices and rituals. My work often lands within and between the boundaries of theater, dance, performance art, new media and installation. Sometimes the underlying curiosities of each project invent new forms. I often gravitate towards subjects of immigration, diaspora, alienation, solidarity, nation/state identities, transgenerational gift and trauma.
I create in the hope that audiences will find themselves in my work, and that experiencing it frees their kind rage out of them. I hold the most joy in these moments of genuine connection. A space where we hear and see each other.
Currently, I’m slowly brewing the twelfth iteration of an intermedia project in incessant development since 2017, She Walks the Air, with the support of NYSCA New York State Council on the Arts Grant Award. I’m also a proud member of the Leon Levy Foundation Roundabout Directors Group — Cohort 6 and an Associate Member of the SDC.
As a scholar, writer, and educator, I have written for The Korean Theatre Review, spoken for The Korea Theatre Association’s seminar, was a part of Ping Chong and Company’s core writing team devising the Hidden Voices: Asian-Americans & Pacific Islanders in the United States for NYC DOE, and taught 13 residencies of Secret Histories Arts-in Education program, including for New Jersey Performing Arts Center and International School Theatre Association.
I owe so much of what I practice to the visionary artists I got to perform for including Ping Chong, Okwui Okpokwasili, and Samita Sinha, as well as Columbia University, where I graduated with an MFA in Theater Directing.