Firehorse and Shadow Live Performance

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Dearest Dreamwalkers,

We are overjoyed to soon premiere our LIVE performances of Firehorse and Shadow, May 4-6 at Left of Main, a location in Vancouver’s Historic Chinatown that has deep significance to me, my mom, my grandmother and my great-grandmother who was brought to ‘Gold Mountain British Columbia' as a servant girl at the turn of the last century.

Gold Mountain is the name that Chinese gave to the place where they dreamed of having a better life.

There were very few Chinese women there in early 1900 and Dai Poa’s children were among a handful of Chinese babies born in the Dominion of Canada. My grandmother Lin was registered under the colonization act. She was considered very fortunate to receive grade 8 education. My mom was born in Chinatown in the Summer of 1934, eleven years into our Federal Government’s’ proclaimed Chinese Exclusion Act, banning all immigration from China for 24 years. It was the year of the Wood Dog and Chinese-Canadians, from within the gates of their ethnic ghetto, worked hard to assimilate and fit in as their government propagated exclusion and anti-Chinese attitudes.

None of these women had role models. With one foot in the old ways, each one of them stepped out on her own to bridge a new path for their children.

The past months have been filled with the joys of re-membering this work with co-creator Annie (our initial premiere date was March 19, 2020…). Our process has been and continues to be deeply informed, stewarded, inspired by, and lovingly supported through the friendship and artistic brilliance of collaborators Sarah Chase and Cindy Mochizuki. How fitting that Firehorse and Shadow is in itself a re-membering of what remains alive in me through cellular memory of the lived experiences of these fierce and beautiful women.

Perhaps you will find yourself on the West Coast on May 4-6? We would love to share this work with you.

- Andrea