In my teaching practice at Utrecht University, I set up collaborations with artists so that students can explore artistic research and research-creation, through the course Emerging and Transforming Media, Art, and Performance. This is a research MA level course that is built upon practice-based methodologies and alternative ways of knowledge-making. We have worked with Studio Julian Hetzel, Het Huis Utrecht, and Robin Coops/ M31/ WeMakeVR in the last few years, and offered dramaturgical advice, creative consultation, and research support.
Continue reading “Artistic Collaborations (2021-2023)”Category: Creative Practice
I have been working with independent dance artist Alysa Leung (Hong Kong) since 2022, with her ongoing artistic research and performance project “Dawn”. “Dawn” is an ongoing research exploring one’s identity through the sense of location and time between cities. The project questions home, displacement, migration, and cultural hybridity, and has travelled from Austria, to Taiwan, to Belgium, and in future, to Japan.
With the support of HK Arts Development Council, we have organised public engagement and open workshops for emerging artists based in Hong Kong in September 2022. In May 2023, we were in residency in kunstcentrum BUDA in Kortrijk, Belgium.
Public ADC-funded events in Hong Kong include a curated conversation with dramaturgs at City Contemporary Dance Company and at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, as well as an open workshop series on performance creation in relation to the city.
To see more event details, please head to Alysa’s website.
In the spirit of dancing my PhD, I created a performance lecture using storytelling and traditional Congolese dance, based on my research on conflict minerals and our digital devices. A work-in-progress performance was presented at a former independent arts space soft/WALL/studs in Singapore in Dec 2018.
Continue reading “When the world is at war, we just keep dancing (2018)”
The film Our Future Network (2016) was developed and collectively made through a residency in Berlin together with an intergenerational group of feminists. Led by Roe, we worked on twenty propositions for feminist collective practices, derived from our lived experience and feminist praxis, through workshops and embodied research. My contribution is titled “A Feminist Energizer” and made use of yoga-inspired movement and meditation to focus attention and bring embodied practices into meeting spaces. This is an alternative way for ideas to be digested, for a sense of community to be cultivated, and for minds and bodies to feel grounded. The script is contextualised and published in the book To Become Two.
In collaboration with Rumen Rachev. Presented at Play/Perform/Participate International Society for Intermediality Studies Conference in Utrecht, April 2015.
In this lecture performance we study water as an interface whereby colonial encounters are activated and shaped. Interface, in its simplest definition, is what lies in between parts or systems, and can simultaneously be a filter, a control device, and a tool that structures social interactions in public space. Through discussions on colonial water management practices, we approach water as a prototypical interface that structures hierarchies and designates boundaries between the coloniser and the savage. Through this intervention, we take on a postcolonial/ decolonial angle on interfaces and interfacing technologies. These include looking at water as providing the surface for (slave and trade) ships to sale, as a discipling tool for cultural dominance over the so called ‘natives’, and as a dividing line between colonisers/colonised.
This understanding of water is predicated upon a media archaeological perspective to dig deep into the everyday life structure of technologically mediated life. In its material manifestation, water also plays an important role in technology: from the usage of water to cool down data centers, to harvesting the power of water to produce electricity, to water introduced as a material metaphor where technology becomes more ‘fluid’. By aligning different perspectives of water as material and metaphorical, we map out how water performs and participates as an interface.
Supported by CASCO and co-presented by If I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution.
Their desire rang through the halls and into the tower (2014) is a spoken performance devised by artist Alex Martinis Roe, and I was a performer who performed live in the Academiegebouw as well as on the film created. The performance intertwines the histories of Anna Maria van Schurman, the first female university student in Europe, who attended Utrecht University in the seventeenth century, and the development of the Women’s and then Gender Studies research school at that same university. Based on oral histories and textual research by Martinis Roe, members of the Graduate Gender Programme of Utrecht University collectively edited the script and performed a group political diagram composed of layered and partial accounts of this trans-historical community.
A devised physical theatre performance with collaborators Rosalia Chieppa, Meike Deveney, Alex Doble, and Michelle Dunlop. Presented in December 2013 at Lumley Theatre, Canterbury, England. What place does feminism have in the world today? Bad Reputation is an exploration of the movement, why people are so quick to dismiss it, and why they perhaps shouldn’t be. A social, political, and cultural revolution that has taken place over more than a century, feminism has experienced its ups and downs, with generations of women and men relating to it in different ways. Is feminism still a mobilising force that shapes our futures? We look into history to reflect upon our ties with it.
A collaboration between director/choreographer Kate March, and artists Patricia Chiu, Muriel Hoffman, Giselle Liu, Jade Yung, and myself. The piece was a movement exploration of the state of ‘glory’, set to a backdrop of Hong Kong street scenes footage. Performances in April 2012, at Moon Gallery, Hong Kong.
Thirst, a collaboration between director/choreographer Kate March, and artists Patricia Chiu, Muriel Hoffman, Giselle Liu, Jade Yung, and myself. 7 performances in February 2012, at Experimenta Gallery, Hong Kong. The interactive piece was developed through movement improvisation and choreography, in addition to a video installation. For details, please refer to the following article I wrote and published in dancejournal/hk as a critical reflection and archiving of the performance.
Improvised Dance and Movement Poetry
Presented in March 2011, A Carnival of Feminist Cultural Activism, The University of York, United Kingdom
Solo Performance “Bloodbonds” is inspired by Gloria Steinem’s essay “If Men Could Menstruate” (1978) and explores my personal experience as a menstruating body and the way through connections and bonds could be forged through this collective experience as a community that bleeds.
EVELYN WAN 
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