From Inner Worlds to Outer Space

This is a critical edition of the major works of one of America's rising innovative performance artists, Dan Kwong. Based at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, California - the premiere showcase on the US's West Coast for multicultural performance art - Kwong burst upon the solo scene in the 1990s with his startlingly new male voice: personal, political, playful and visionary. Through live dialogue, dance, song, puppetry, martial arts and video, Kwong's multimedia performances capture audience's attention and imagination as he takes them into the worlds of his Chinese-Japanese-American heritage, of his evolving sense and experience of manhood in the US and of his fantastical, otherworldly flights into theatrical spaces beyond. This book is part of the "Critical Performances" series which makes available the performance texts of artists who are working at the cutting edge of theatre. Each book features a pairing of an artist and a critic, and takes the form of a dialogue between them, aimed at elucidating both disciplines. The books are designed both as critical introductions to the artists and as scholarly introductions to the field at large.
Collected here for the first time are "Monkhood in 3 Easy Lessons", "Tales from the Fractured Tao with Master Nice Guy", "Correspondence of a Dangerous Enemy Alien", "The Dodo Vaccine" and "The Night the Moon Landed on 39th Street and Other Tales of Wonder". Also included are a preface by Dan Kwong, an extensive interview with the artist, excerpts from interviews with men who have participated in Kwong's highly acclaimed Asian-American Men's Autoperformance Workshop and 15 production photographs.