Cassie Wang

As a Dance Lab resident at the Boston Center for the Arts, Cassie Wang will conduct a study on longing and fabricated nostalgia, building toward an evening-length, interdisciplinary performance integrating contemporary dance, storytelling, and generative video art. Responding to a selection of songs by Big Thief, the lyricism of the American indie folk band will guide an ethnographic inquiry and movement research with her collaborators. Using her technical background in computer science and media production, she plans to visually depict the ethnographic findings using a BigGAN text-to-image generator, juxtaposing the raw, unembellished storytelling of fictionalized early memories with the highly curated and artificial medium of generative art. This study on longing aims to cultivate mutual understanding—longing emerges from a perceived gap in our identities, and to know what someone longs for is to witness the core of their being.