Our first socially engaged theater project, The Legend of Nüwa in the New Century, draws on the myth of Nüwa, the Chinese goddess of creation, to critically examine contemporary motherhood, women’s reproductive rights, undervalued care work, and gender inequality. Rather than treating motherhood as a private or naturalized condition, the project situates it within broader social, economic, and institutional structures. Read through a contemporary lens, this female creation myth poses a critical question: 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?
The ongoing project includes the theater piece What? She, a mother?, the documentary theater project The Portrait of a Mother, the collaborative community theater project From Morning To Night, and a series of workshops for people who identify as women. Through these interconnected formats, the project creates spaces for women’s lived experiences to be shared, witnessed, and collectively reflected upon, foregrounding theater as a practice of social care and communal engagement.
Under the framework of The Legend of Nüwa in the New Century, in 2025, we launched The Portrait of a Mother, a documentary theatre project developed through an open call and open to women aged 18–65 in Chengdu. Over several months of workshops, six women from diverse backgrounds co-created and performed stories drawn from their mothers’ lives and, where relevant, their own experiences of motherhood.
Learn moreA theatre piece based on research and documentary materials on reproductive experiences in Chengdu — shifting attention from demographic discourse toward the lived experiences of individual women.
Learn moreFrom 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.
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