JADE CIRCLE
Jade Circle is an interdisciplinary solo performance by Jasmine Chen. Through powerful music, captivating movement, and poignant storytelling in Mandarin and English, Jasmine finds her place within the legacy of her matriarchs. Yearning to reconnect with her late grandmother, she embarks on a transformative journey to relearn Mandarin and unearths the lost stories of her grandmother’s past through intimate interviews with her mother. This 60 minute experience includes a 45 minute performance followed by a 15 minute audience talkback.
A part of The Mother Tongue Project, produced by Rice and Beans Theatre. Jade Circle received its World Premiere in 2024 with a presentation by Gateway Theatre in association with Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre. The piece was performed in the Gateway Studio B Theatre in Richmond, BC.
Jade Circle also includes an interactive lobby display PATHWAYS HOME. An interactive map, where audience members are invited to trace their families’ migration paths. At the end of the run, the global journeys of every audience are visible in the hundreds of red strings that represent the many lands that we call home.
Another key element of Jade Circle is the Community Dinner. This gathering is an opportunity for audience members to share stories of family, language, and culture. Inviting the audience into the world of the play, we partner with a local Chinese restaurant, and get to know one another over steaming plates of delicious Chinese food!
Jade Circle is available for touring. Please email heather@riceandbeanstheatre.com for more information. Please see Press page for all articles and coverage.
THE MOTHER TONGUE PROJECT
The Mother Tongue Project is a 60 minute interview-based multidisciplinary theatre piece performed in English and Mandarin. It is a duet of meditations on mortality, family, love and loss created by myself and creator/performer En Lai Mah. Originally conceived in 2016, I later expanded my story inside of it which became Jade Circle.
ORIGIN STORY
Starting in 2016, En Lai Mah and I have been connecting with our parents, uncovering our family histories that have framed the cultural context of our hyphenated identities as Chinese-Canadians. The question: "What is your mother tongue?" a seemingly simple question, has brought about complex answers. Mother Tongue has come to mean more than just first-learned languages, it encompasses the anchors of cultural connection we have to our elders and beyond.
My connection to the Chinese language was through the Mandarin songs my grandmother taught me as a child. I was singing in Mandarin before I was speaking it. After my grandmother’s death, I felt the loss of forgetting those songs, and through my interviews with my Mother, I have begun to relearn them. Through this process, I’ve been creating a performance that brings to light the pervading cycles of silence that are inherited from mother to daughter. In layering song and projections of interview transcripts, voices begin to emerge that bear witness to displacement and intergenerational trauma.
En Lai is of mixed race and does not speak Mandarin. His father, who was born in China felt that it was more essential for him to learn Kung Fu than Mandarin. By learning about his father's lifelong dedication to Chinese martial arts, En Lai has immersed himself in a practice that has connected father to son for three generations. Through movement and text, En Lai transforms into his father Peter who speaks of his own adoption, instability during the Chinese civil war, and his eventual migration to Canada. En Lai uses martial arts as a form of moving meditation, reflecting on the vast differences between his father’s and his own life path.
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
2016 The Mother Tongue Project produced by Then They Fight Theatre received a sold out run at the Black Cat Artspace
2017 Performance at the Lift Off Festival produced by Cahoots Theatre. Dramaturgy by Marjorie Chan and Movement Consultation by Indrit Kasapi
2018 Ontario Arts Council Recommender Grants from Crow’s Theatre and fu-GEN Theatre
2019 A workshop reading was presented at the Gateway Theatre with direction and dramaturgy by Jivesh Parasram
2020 Technical workshop with new media by Chimerik Collective, sound by Meg Roe and Alessandro Juliani, lights by Jono Kim
2021 Banff Playwright’s Lab
2021 DBLSPK presentation produced by rice and beans theatre. Lights: Vanka Salim, Sound: Meg Roe, New Media: Chimerik, Film: Anthony Lee
The gateway language exchange gameshow
hallows’ eve paper theatre kit
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Gateway Theatre’s 2020/2021 theatre season was cancelled, I created the Hallows’ Eve Paper Theatre Kit with Keely O’Brien. This was an off-screen interactive activity for families in October 2020, intended to offer a safe way to engage with theatre and ignite the imaginations of people of all ages. This was at a time when door-to-door Halloween trick or treating was being cancelled, so we wanted to offer an alternative way to celebrate the season. I created the original script and characters which we invited participants to perform at home. In collaboration with Keely, she designed all of the paper theatre components which people could easily cut and assemble. The Gateway Theatre staff lovingly assembled the kits and mailed them out to families across the country and even across the pond! We drew our inspiration from a long tradition of paper theatre making, popularized during the Regency era in England.
“I was a high school Drama Teacher for years and this was a lovely project to work on with kids! We even made a video of it and the smallest one who couldn't read sat on my lap and filmed the show!” – Paper Theatre Kit patron
“What a wonderful setup! The art was gorgeous and we love that there's a nonbinary character!! Thanks” – Paper Theatre Kit patron
Hallows’ eve POP-UP theatre
In the fall of 2021, we allowed ourselves to dream even bigger and made our miniature paper theatre into a lifesize pop-up theatre! Made from ultraboard and cloroplast, the pop-up paper theatre travelled to the Steveston Cannery and Aberdeen Centre in Richmond for multiple weekends in October. Families were invited to play with our lifesize puppets and perform inside the theatre.