SOP - Performance Studies

I was born in a music family—my father has a beautiful voice and loves to sing; my mother enjoys listening to music (Western and Chinese oldies and undoubtedly—my father』s singing too); she listens to music 24 hours a day and leaves the radio on even when she sleeps.  Growing up in such an environment, music has become my sixth 「essential food group」 since I was born.  Subsequently, I not only learned to appreciate music, but also had a strong desire to produce those beautiful tunes and even create some of my own.

I started my group/individual piano lessons in the YAMAHA Music School and soon was able to perform with my classmates in 3 concerts held by YAMAHA Music School in the local cultural center.  That was the first time I experienced the unprecedented raptures and the amazing power of art presentation via collaboration. After growing up, I found another form of fantastic music performance, that is, Jazz.  The reason I love Jazz is because of its unbelievable power to smooth me mentally and physically.  Especially after realizing its origin and history, I can now better understand why Jazz has such  amazing power to comfort a person』s body and soul.   

In my teenage years, I was pleasantly surprised to find another art form that has continued to fascinate me immensely—theater.  I participated in varied drama activities in school—as a director, actress, and playwright.  No matter which part I played in each theater production, I spent unbelievable hours and energy working on it.  When the job was finished, I knew every minute was worthy of it.

Summer of 2001 was a crucial moment in my life—I stayed in New York and went to many musicals during that period of time and that totally turned my world of music and theater upside down.  I have heard all of those hits before, but it was definitely another story when I was faced with the real performance in front of my eyes: the musicals blew open my 21-year passion toward music and theater performance.  What』s more, I found New York City itself was a living art displaying  twenty-four hours a day  the diversified and enormous energy and creativity of people there.

To explore the field of performance, I took as many drama-related courses as I could at National Central University—Play Writing, Selective Readings in Euro-American Drama, World Performance and Culture and so on.  Being an English major, my undergraduate education has provided me with a solid foundation to appreciate world literature/performance and diversified fields of cultural studies such as postcolonial, queer, feminist studies and so on.  In my senior year, I wrote and directed a musical with another classmate for our Graduation Drama Performance—we adapted from 6 famous scripts (Romeo and Juliet, The Little Mermaid, Lady Chatterley's lover, the Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and so on) and wrote a play to portray women』s love, sorrow, hate and desire from the ancient to the present and our expectation for a newborn female subjectivity for this modern world.  That experience not only reinforced my belief in the importance of teamwork and helped me learn how to shape and present individual creativity and thought to the audience via collaboration but also gave me a better understanding of women』s role in the society.  After graduation, I also actively participated in many theater workshops such as musical performance training, people』s theater and dramaturgist / director workshop.

These experiences in academic and practical training have allowed me to isolate myself form the society temporally to diagnose and analyze the cultures that I have lived in, that is, to see how these cultures benefit or damage our lives.  Furthermore, I also developed an enormous passion toward human beings as a species and their creations.  The passion drives me to produce and develop more creations, although those passionate sensations are sometimes almost too strong to let me shape them rationally as a scholar, writer or even a creator.  But it is also that passion which enables me to play the roles that I have mentioned above.

Being a theater/music participator and addict, the more performances I was involved in, the deeper I felt that it is not possible that we only talk about creativity and skill of the performance.  I feel I must also try to study how such behaviors and situations are embedded in this society; that is, how these social cultures trigger this creativity--that is also the most pressing question I would like to answer in my graduate studies.  Through my search on the internet, I have found that your diversified program can offer me the right courses and environment to satisfy my desire to study performance. Furthermore, with your workshops and courses, such as performance composition, theories of directing, performance writing and so forth, your program offers me great opportunities to turn these theories into practice.      

 If I could complete the education and training in this fine program and take full advantage of New York City』s incomparable resources for myriad kinds of performances, I would like to pursue a career as a director, writer or artist with a profound interdisciplinary and intercultural understanding of this world.