i’m conor. i write, dream, direct, collaborate, speculate, act, and make performances.
i come from mixed settler backgrounds (chinese + european) and live in a place that is colonially known as vancouver, which is the unceded and ancestral territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh nations.
i speculate often. about possible futures. about possible performances. about other lives and ways we can be. my performances are experiments, or maybe dreams. they might be like puzzles, or webs, or lies, or mischief. sometimes they speak straight to an audience in a real moment, and sometimes they pretend to be elsewhere.
i am a member of a collective called A Wake of Vultures. i’m good friends with Theatre Replacement and Hong Kong Exile. you may know them, and they are a part of me. i come from theatre, but it usually looks pretty different.
i make performances about a lot of different things, but i’ve noticed some patterns that keep coming back:
i mess around with scale
i write science fiction
i destabilize audience perspective
i joke around strangely
ideas come very quickly for me
in 2016, i was commissioned to create a 10-minute work for an outdoor event. “10 minutes is hard,” i thought to myself, “how can you make anything that feels like more than a sketch?” doing due diligence (i couldn’t just make the first idea), i started a list of 100 possible performances, and when i finished, i would choose one to actually make.
(unsurprisingly) i became more interested in the list itself, rather than any of the individual ideas. i liked what it said about my brain. so i set out to stage the list. in the performance, i read aloud dozens of short synopses, and prototyped the sets and scenography for several of them. none of them were truly finished. some were 1% built, some maybe 12% or 20%. “ok I’ll allow it,” i told myself, “but the number of 12% built things should total over 100% so people don’t think i’m slacking.”
i believe in flights of fancy, of massive scales of imagination. i’m interested in saturation. i like to sketch and speculate. i like it when an audience has lots of space to imagine things, too. at the time, i was grieving my father. “how could I settle on one way to grieve, when this grief blindsides me in hundreds of different ways, whenever I least expect it?” there were many reasons for the list.
ideas come quickly for me. this is an asset and a trap. the asset is i never feel a lack of inspiration. the trap is that a single project may actually be 100 ideas loosely-threaded: hard to hang onto.
now, my imagination still runs wild. i imagine whole futures and societies. i like to build universes in tv or novel or video game scale. i come from theatre so that makes things difficult. but I have lots of strategies to deal with that. i make art using videogame technology like unity + minecraft (these are very cinematic). my heart-project is K BODY AND MIND. in it, i tell a single story from a fictional universe called NEW SILICA, a deregulated island where start-ups experiment freely with genetics, bionics, etc. K BODY AND MIND follows one woman, Kawabi, a security agent for a ‘body-share’ company called THE GROVE. two performers play the story like broken robots. they are a tiny keyhole into a very large room.
so now I think I am doing this: crafting little windows into huge universes. there is the one side dreaming up big universes, and the little guy tinkering with the window.
“But what about this other story in NEW SILICA? What about this other corporation? Does it need to be so early in the program? What if they were 10 years along already? What about 1000 years in the future?”
“Shh, shhh. Keep dreaming, keep dreaming. We’ll do that in the TV series. Tell this one story.”
“But there is so much to say.”
“You don’t have to do it all at once. Do this one. Tell this one for now.”