Playwright/performer Alvin Eng and author/choreographer Muna Tseng will read from and discuss their current theatrical/literary projects, OUR LAUNDRY, OUR TOWN and IT’S ALL TRUE: GRANDFATHER.
OUR LAUNDRY, OUR TOWN is Eng’s prose expansion of his memoir monologue, “The Last Emperor of Flushing.” The memoir chronicles his growing up in the shadows of the Cold War in a 1970s Chinese Hand Laundry in Flushing, Queens, NYC, to performing his one-man show, The Last Emperor of Flushing, in a former People’s Hall of the Cultural Revolution in his family’s ancestral Guangdong province.
IT’S ALL TRUE: GRANDFATHER is the third dance-theater chapter of Tseng’s “Family Portrait” series. The piece constructs a portrait of myth, object, and dialogue with real and imagined ancestors. Taking Tseng’s paternal grandfather as a departure point, the work spans over 300 years and examines East-West legacy, gender, personal identity and aspirations, cultural alienation and assimilation. Tseng is developing IT’S ALL TRUE: GRANDFATHER as an artist-in-residence at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. The series also includes the Bessie Award-winning and nominated pieces, STELLA and SLUTFORART.
Muna Tseng was born and raised in Hong Kong. In Canada she began her modern dance training at age 13 with Magda and Gertrude Hanova, disciples of Mary Wigman and with Heather McCallum who worked with Anna Halprin. Invited to New York by Jean Erdman after graduating from University of British Columbia, Tseng was a principal dancer in Erdman and her husband and mythologist Joseph Campbell’s Theatre of the Open Eye from 1978 to 1985, inherited many of Erdman’s seminal roles, dancing to originally commissioned music by John Cage, Teiji Ito, Lou Harrison, Louis Horst. She founded Muna Tseng Dance Projects in New York City in 1984, has created over 40 productions and performed in over 30 cities and festivals in 15 countries. She has won a Bessie: New York Dance & Performance Award; repeat Choreographic Fellowships from National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and has been honored as "Artist of National Merit" from The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. "Best Choreography” for The Silver River in Philadelphia's 2000 theater season, the Manhattan Borough President’s Award for "Distinguished Service in the Arts," and the “Chinese American Cultural Pioneers Award for Excellence in the Arts” from New York City Council President Andrew Stein.
Alvin Eng is a native NYC playwright, performer and educator. His plays and performances have been seen Off-Broadway, throughout the U.S., as well as in Paris, Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China. His memoir, Our Laundry, Our Town: My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond, was published in May 2022 by Fordham University Press. Eng is the author and editor of the oral history/play anthology, Tokens? The NYC Asian American Experience on Stage. No Passport Press recently published Three Trees, the first of his Portrait Plays series of historical dramas about artists. He was awarded a 2022 LMCC Creative Engagement grant for a “Hong Kong Handover: 25 Years Later” symposium in conjunction with his acoustic punk raconteur solo show, Here Comes Johnny Yen Again (or How I Kicked Punk).
