UPCOMING TRAIN/STOPPED CLOCK/UNTITLED WAITING Set for Dream Up Festival, 8/24-30

UPCOMING TRAIN/STOPPED CLOCK/UNTITLED WAITING will play Dream Up Festival, Saturday, August 24, 2013 through Friday, August 30, 2013 at The Joyce and Seward Johnson Theater, Theater for the New City. Tickets are $15.

Two actors waiting for the train to come on the platform, but they never really get on any train no matter how many trains have arrived and departed. Not until another two actors take off from the train do they finally realize what they are waiting for is not the train but an answer to the question: what are we anticipating?

Upcoming Train/Stopped Clock/Untitled Waiting, inspired by Waiting for Godot, through the eastern and Buddhist philosophy, this play will examine the absurdity of quotidian life as well as artistic life, and raise an unanswerable question: what are we actually waiting for?

Created 60 years ago, Waiting for Godot raised the existentialist question to reflect on the Sisyphean quotidian life. Yet, 60 years later in 2013, the problem reaches to the extreme resulted from the influence of capitalism and all other repetitive imbalanced power relations. To respond to those, chants for revolution are heard. Politicians, scholars, activists, and even artists stand out to offer solutions, to provoke ideas, or to strike revolutions with their utopian imaginations. Repetition is still there constraining us no matter what. We are still waiting, waiting for a change, a revolution, a better world, a termination, and perhaps, Godot. Are we really trying to make something different? Or are we just masturbating ourselves by imagining utopia?

Upcoming Train/Stopped Clock/Untitled Waiting aims to reflect on how "Godot" has affected our lives for the past 60 years, and to go back to the very essence of the ridicule of repetition, time, in order to find another answer for the contemporary society. The meaning of time has to be redefined so that human existence can be scrutinized. Upcoming Train/Stopped Clock/Untitled Waiting is a manifesto of the ritual of waiting, presented by four characters in representation of the general public and artists. The ritual, addressed upon life/death and reality/illusion, will be shown by paronomasia within the conversation, by metatheatre, by the interaction among the animate beings (characters) and the inanimate beings (mannequins), and by the embodiment of the sufferings from the ritual itself to accent the timelessness of the action and the ridicule of the action itself.

Ninety percent of the production team is consisted of Taiwanese artists. Upcoming Train/Stopped Clock/Untitled Waiting attempts to enact the western classics through the embodiment of the eastern philosophy. From Taiwan to China to Japan to United States, all artists contribute to bring in the eastern philosophical viewpoint to manifest the very essence of this play: other than waiting, will there be any other possibilities that we can manage to create?

Starring Tavarius Graves, Claire Shang-Ling Kuei, Owen Scott, and Anthony Walters, Upcoming Train/Stopped Clock/Untitled Waiting features stage design by Yin-Chiao Liao, costume design by Sienna Zhen Huang, lighting design by Yi-Chung Chen, sound design by Shu-Ying Chung and stage management by Mika Yin-Chih Lee and Wanning Jen. Produced by Claire Shang-Ling Kuei, Mika Yin-Chih Lee, and Dennis Yueh-Yeh Li. Production Assistant Utako Nakayasu, Hsin-Yuan Peng, Mini Gu, Grace Li and Yu-Chien Liu. Graphic design by Lisa Lee.

Dennis Yueh-Yeh Li earned his MA in Performance Studies at NYU Tisch. Currently, Li is the member of The Living Theatre and The Performance Troupe of The Forum Project, aiming to create performances embodying political issues and power relations to strike a possible revolution. His directing credits include his original plays: "In Search of Shakespeare"; "She/Her" and "The Trial" in addition to modern plays: "Nikita" (by Rosebud Ben-Oni, Piney Fork Press Theatre); "The Echoes" (Adam Roebuck/The AlphaNYC); "Marat/Sade", and "Six Character In Search of An Author". Other credits include "Here We Are" (The Living Theatre); "Spring Pictures of the Floating World" (Peculiar Works Project) and "Kiss Me, so I am Queer" (a performance art piece, Chashama).

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