From Morning To Night

From October 2024 to May 2025, in collaboration with Beijing Mulan Huakai Social Work Service Center, we developed From Morning to Night, a documentary theatre project created through weekly workshops with rural-to-urban migrant women, most of whom are mothers.

These women moved from rural areas to Beijing for work or marriage, entering urban life under China’s household registration (hukou) system, which limits access to employment, social services, and long-term urban integration for those without local urban registration.

Many participants became full-time mothers after marriage, a gendered trajectory that further restricts their ability to re-enter the labor market. Using documentary theatre as a method, the project draws on lived experiences of motherhood and female labor, including breastfeeding, daily caregiving, and repeated inter-regional mobility structured by family responsibilities. These narratives foreground women’s reproductive and domestic labor largely absent from dominant accounts of migration and urban labor.

The project was developed throughout months of theater workshops and premiered in Beijing in May 2025. Alongside personal testimonies, the performance incorporates the figure of Nüwa, the mythological creator of humanity. Read through a contemporary lens, this female creation myth opens a critical inquiry: what kinds of labor, care, and responsibility are borne by women today, and how do historical imaginaries of creation and motherhood continue to shape — and obscure these realities in the present.