Adrienne Chan

Premiered in Harvard Ballet Company’s With Love in Spring 2023.

Music: Arp II Float Away by Dan Deacon and Dance Card: No. 2 Breeze Serenade by Jennifer Higdon

“Faraway engine” is a prompt from Gaga, an encouragement to experiment in how we can move, for instance, a hand or a foot, using muscles from a remote part of the body. Much more, this prompt asks us a question: what moves us? How far? How close? 

“Faraway Engine” is about diaspora and the experience of hyphenated identities. Moreover, it is about reconnection and recognition: a remembrance of what was lost through social death and colonization, an acknowledgement that family can be recreated anywhere. This work is inspired by the graphic novel, The Arrival by Shaun Tan. At the core of “Faraway Engine” is an exploration of what it means to create Asian-American art: art that does not co-opt the trauma of our parents’ and ancestors’ migrations, but art that depicts, embodies, questions, confronts, processes, and interacts with our feeling of being torn at the seams.

Photographed by Addison Liu.

Original cast: Sedina Ackuayi, Selorna Ackuayi, Adrienne Chan, Aurelia Han, Nikoletta Kennedy, Sara Komatsu, Nina Montalbano, Sophie O’Melia, SoEun (Sonya) Park, Liliana Price, Anna Torten Rabinowitz, Salema Trabelsi, Shelby Tzung, Cole Yellin