photo credit: Yining Chi
Thursday, December 11, 2025
Friday, December 12, 2025
General Admission: $15-40 (sliding scale)
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Cloud States is a new multi-disciplinary dance project / film screening / live art performance by Jian Yi.
Cloud States is a tender, visually-rich meditation on loss / love and self-identity, inviting audiences to reflect, feel, and rediscover what connects us across borders and experience.
Interwoven by choreography sculpted in immersive light atmospheres to create a sensory experience questioning the boundaries between dream / memory and reality – the work features a talented ensemble of trans-national performers in a powerful combination of video art, dance, autobiographical / personal storytelling and immersive lighting / FX. The work explores intersectional-migrant identities, the process of reconciling living in a new time and place with our ancestral connections and familial memories – and creates an awareness / new perception of personal-yearning for the fragile beauty and nostalgia of living in the present time. Set across neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, the work is a love letter to the city of immigrants and new beginnings.
At its heart is a multi-channel video installation in the performance space – an epic-visual poem chronicling intimate portraits of personal / migrant storytelling, quiet moments of beauty and joy paired with live performers moving sensuously through shifting atmospheres of light / sound and psychic-emotional space. By merging poetic-filmic storytelling, immersive lighting design and dance, the piece creates a liminal space whereby memory, identity, and the present / past / future of all the experiential-moments of our lives as ‘lonely travellers’ through this world collide.
CREDITS
Choreographer / Writer / Director: Jian Yi
Performers: Katherine De La Cruz, Yuxi Ma, Jian Yi
Cinematographer / Project Assistant: Yining Chi
Production / Lighting Designer: Tuçe Yasak
Producing Associate: Stephanie Acosta
ABOUT JIAN X YI
Through Jian Yi's multidisciplinary work of performance art / contemporary dance, video art / photography, new genres, installation art, and social sculpture – they seek to explore the experiential trauma of marginalized persons within our society, such as neurodiverse and queer people of color, and how we reflect on the broader human condition. Their practice is rooted in an ongoing enquiry into the ambiguities of emotional experience, and touches upon borderline states – considering Otherness, neurodivergence and alternative states of consciousness / being – in line with their continuing research focus on queer mental health. Jian Yi's work has been performed/exhibited internationally in locations such as New Museum, The Kitchen NYC, ACMI Melbourne, Buddies in Bad Times Toronto, Contact Manchester, CPT London, DanceLive Aberdeen, Summerhall, Dance Base Edinburgh, Tramway and Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow. They have been selected for awards / funding and artist residencies including with Cove Park, Tramway, Unlimited, Dance4, Dance Base, Made in Scotland at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe / Summerhall, Take Me Somewhere Festival / Work Room Glasgow, Creative Scotland, NTS, Live Art Development Agency London, Movement Research NYC, Brooklyn Arts Council, Theatertreffen Berlin, People's History Museum Manchester, and Seventh Gallery Melbourne among others. In 2023, they curated / produced the second edition of Journey to the East Festival – featuring performing artists including Matt Mullican, Sung Im Her, River Lin, and Keioui Keijaun Thomas.
OUR FUNDERS + SUPPORT
Jian Yi / Cloud States was awarded BAC's 2025 – ‘Creative Equations Fund: Cultural Heritage & Diversity + Dance’. Creative Equations Fund is sponsored by the Howard Gilman Foundation, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council. Jian Yi is a 2024-2026 Movement Research Artist in Residence in support of the development of their project Cloud States, funded in part by the Jerome Foundation.