“I Teach the Audience How to Watch My Shows”: An Interview with Kristina Wong
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- “I Teach the Audience How to Watch My Shows”: An Interview with Kristina Wong
When I conceived of the Theatre Journal special issue on Minor Asias, artist Kristina Wong came immediately to mind because of work she had done in Uganda and her embodied political performance as an elected official in Los Angeles. Then COVID-19 and the latest wave of Black Lives Matter protests delayed the interview, and in the interim Wong started the Auntie Sewing Squad, which sewed thousands of masks for communities in need. In the wake of all these events, Kristina and I reconnected to discuss the links of politics and performance and the transversal relationships between different minoritarian communities.
A third-generation Chinese American raised in San Francisco, Kristina is a performance artist, comedian, writer, and elected representative who has been presented internationally across North America, the UK, Hong Kong, and Africa. She has been a guest on late-night television shows and an actor in film and in television. Her work has been awarded numerous grants, including the Center Theatre Group’s 2019 Sherwood Award for her contribution to the Los Angeles theatre landscape and her work as an innovative and adventurous artist. She has created viral web series like How Not to Pick Up Asian Chicks, and she just launched the second season of the award-winning Radical Cram School. Her rap career in post-conflict northern Uganda is the subject of her last solo theatre show, which toured the United States, Canada, and Lagos, Nigeria (presented by the US Consulate). Her long-running show Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest looks at the high rates of depression and suicide among Asian American women and is now a concert film. Her newest performance project is Kristina Wong for Public Office, a simultaneous real-life stint in public office and show. In her most blurry performance piece yet, Kristina currently serves as the elected representative of Wilshire Center Koreatown Sub-district 5 Neighborhood Council. [End Page E-9]
I have been thinking about lateral relationships among different minoritarian groups and how those can contest or reify hegemony. In this vein, your work was featured this past March in Image Movers, the film festival for the fiftieth anniversary of the UCLA Center for Asian American Studies. Could you discuss selections from your oeuvre that were included in that festival and what was left out?
It was in the before times [before COVID-19 and George Floyd’s killing] that this event happened. A few episodes of Radical Cram School were peppered throughout the festival from our second season. And I did sort of an updated performance of Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And then we showed ten to fifteen minutes from the concert film that was shot in 2008.
I just wanted to start with that event partly because it was so emotive. You started that show almost fifteen years ago, I think.
I premiered Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 2006. It was about a year and a half before that when I decided to make this show about mental health. I don’t even think that the show was in a place that I could perform it without completely injuring myself [emotionally] until at least a year and a half on the road, just kind of getting it down to a performance and not a ritual with no end. (Fig. 1.)
I think that was your first big touring production. Is that correct?
Yes. I had a couple shows before that. But Cuckoo’s Nest felt like a show with a beginning, middle, end; it felt like the most developed thing I’d ever written. And it very much became my identity because I was so obsessed with touring it and making the world see it to the point that I wasn’t sure how to move on. I guess when you ask what wasn’t shown in the Image Movers festival, it was the three shows that I had made up until now to kind of get out of that. Those shows were Going...
