Theatre Journal

This interview with TeAda Productions highlights the nearly three-decade-old inter/multidisciplinary theater organization’s commitment to community-based theater work dedicated to telling stories of immigrants and refugees. Founded by Leilani Chan in 1996, with Ova Saopeng now as the Co-Artistic Director, TeAda has pivoted away from the traditional “theater season” that includes presenting and producing works to focus on creating original ensemble work. In this interview, Chan and Saopeng discuss their works (Refugee Nation, with Laotian American communities; Global Taxi Drivers, with immigrant and refugee workers from Somali, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Russian, Thai, Ecuadorian, and Mexican refugees, and immigrant workers in the global taxi industry; and Masters of the Currents, inspired by the stories of Micronesians living in Hawai’i today), their methods of creation, and the relationships they have built and continue to maintain with those they have worked with. Centering community perspectives as their primary source, TeAda employs talk-stories, story-telling workshops, and individual interviews to construct the narrative of their theater pieces. [End Page E-55]

TeAda identifies as a “nomadic theater,” inspired by the communities whose stories and experiences of itinerancy, displacement, migration, and diaspora TeAda foregrounds in their performance work.² In their discussion of the relationships they create and maintain through their ensemble work both in and beyond Los Angeles, we recognize an articulation of Rossi Braidotti’s “politically invested cartography of the present condition of mobility in a globalized world…stressing the fundamental power differential among categories of humans and nonhuman travelers and movers.”³ Although TeAda’s reference to “nomadism and displacement” may sound similar to how postmodern theory uses these concepts to describe the contemporary human condition, Chan, Saopeng, and TeAda’s work emphasizes the importance of recognizing the power dynamics that contribute to the experience of displacement and nomadism. Their works portray these conditions as not simply consequences of modern society but are shaped by particular forms of inequality and marginalization. “Nomadic” also describes TeAda’s process of traveling to various communities outside Los Angeles to create their ensemble work and how their process has connected otherwise disparate communities. With their current work, Masters of the Currents, the presumed mobility of people from the Federated States of Micronesia [FSM], Guam, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands [RMI] exposes the continuing imperialist occupation by the United States. The US geopolitical investments in the Western Pacific create mobility pathways for those states’ citizens. Yet this mobility is encased in precarity and indeterminate relations with the US government and society that positions them as unequal and subordinate.

For nearly three decades, I have had the honor and privilege of working with, witnessing, and learning from Leilani, Ova, and TeAda Productions’ work. I have benefitted from the space/home they have created for Asian American and the broader BIPOC, queer theater artists in Los Angeles and beyond. [End Page E-56]