Type: Performance
Text
Duration: 12:25 min
Location: Studio de Bakkerij
Year: 2023
Dear Dad, is a letter Hooi-Ying wrote to their dad. In it, Hooi-Ying tries to find a connection with their dad with the lack of a shared verbal, emotional and cultural language as their challenge. In this letter Hooi-Ying not only researches within their relationship to their dad, but also places it in wider themes like immigration and patriarchical expectations. In the performance, Hooi-Ying expands further on this, through a conversation with themselves in the form of two intertwining mediums, their voice recording self and the physical self, in which they use popping dance techniques to complete the full emotional extent of this letter.
The performance exists to facilitate conversations on the pressures and restrictions set on all genders by the patriarchy. And bring forward the intersectionality of this struggle when it comes to children of immigrants.
In this work Hooi-Ying tries to apply the theory from ‘The Will to Change - Men, Masculinity and Love’ by bell hooks, a way to live the theory.
Pictures by: Shivaani Durga