FAC XTRA RETREAT (FXR)
Ei Arakawa, Patty Chang, Pearl C Hsiung, Amanda Ross-Ho, Anna Sew Hoy, Shirley Tse, and Amy Yao
Past event
- Price
- $20*
- Genre
- Theater
- Season
- Winter/Spring 2023
- DATE
- FEB 17-18
- TIME
- FRI, 8:30 PM
SAT, 2 PM
- RUNTIME
- Approx. 60 minutes, no intermission
- COUNTRY
- USA
- Program
- Download Program Notes (PDF)
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About
FAC XTRA RETREAT (FXR) is a studio art pedagogy-themed performance by a temporal grouping of seven Asian American artist-educators based in L.A.: Ei Arakawa, Patty Chang, Pearl C Hsiung, Amanda Ross-Ho, Anna Sew Hoy, Shirley Tse, and Amy Yao. Academia uses acronyms more than Gen Zers! Inspired by the many mandatory online training modules and follow-up quizzes required of instructors by their teaching institutions, FAC XTRA RETREAT (FXR) promises “learning outcomes” with a series of weird, hard, soft, informative, and sometimes physically challenging multiple-choice problems with answers deeply associated with each artist’s teaching philosophy. With the help of suspicious polling devices, costumed performers and all members of the public take on-stage votes. The results of the polls will be acted out, branched out, and change the destination of the performance. Participants will be awarded an FXR certificate of completion at the end.
about the artists
Ei Arakawa
Ei Arakawa is a Japan-born American performance artist based in Los Angeles, teaching at ArtCenter College of Design. Arakawa’s performances are often created through fervent collaborations with artists (and at times their artworks) and audience members themselves.
Patty Chang
Patty Chang is an artist, educator, and parent who resolves to spend more time in close attention and teaches at USC Roski School of Art and Design.
Pearl C Hsiung
Pearl C Hsiung is a Taiwan-born American artist based in Los Angeles teaching at Pomona College. Hsiung’s painting, video, and installations summon landscapes to question human-nature dualisms and explore the speculative space of our physical, energetic, and temporal entanglement.
Amanda Ross-Ho
Amanda Ross-Ho is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles. Motivated by an archival compulsion, she develops intimacy with artifacts that populate commonplace encounters, elevating them into monuments and speculative ecologies that diagram the complex collateral of time. She is a professor of Sculpture at the University of California, Irvine.
Anna Sew Hoy
Anna Sew Hoy is a New Zealand-born American artist based in Los Angeles who utilizes sculpture, ceramics, public art, and performance in order to examine the world and our relations in it. She is a professor of Art at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture.
Shirley Tse
Shirley Tse is a Hong Kong-born artist based in California. Working in the media of sculpture, installation, photography, and text, she at once deconstructs the world of synthetic objects and constructs models in which differences might come together. She teaches at CalArts.
Amy Yao
Amy Yao was in the ’90s punk band Emily’s Sassy Lime and is a contemporary visual artist based in Topanga, California, working in many different mediums informed by ideas of waste, consumption, and identity. Yao is teaching at Princeton University.
cast & creative team
Performed by Ei Arakawa, Patty Chang, Pearl C Hsiung, Amanda Ross-Ho, Anna Sew Hoy, Shirley Tse, Amy Yao
Sample Quizzes
1. “Oh, do you go to school here?” “No, I’m your kid’s fucking professor.” What to do?
A) “You are Asian.”
B) “You are in kindergarten.”
C) “Where is Campus Security?”
2. Do you have to go through a force field into another dimension to teach?
A) Everything Everywhere All at Once.
B) I’m not a service provider!
C) Depends on how much you pay me.
3. I was always thinking about this kind of teacher-student divide, and how to break down the divide without being creepy. What to do?
A) It’s Halloween.
B) Text me!
C) Build the wall.
D) Hire more adjuncts.
4. Precarity of visiting artists and adjuncts. What to do?
A) No IDEA DEI EDJI.
B) Adult learner of ice skating.
C) “Social benefit is way greater than monetary cost.”
