Performance, 2023-2025
A co-production with ↘︎ East Alien Company (Yumo Cheng, Xiaoji Song, Yve Oh).
1.0 Version: 18 min, APAL@Amnasia.6 residency, Berliner Ringtheater, Germany, May 9th 2023.
2.0 Version: 45 min, Performing Exile Festival, Berliner Festspiele, Germany, June 27th 2025.
Artistic direction & Concept: EAST ALIEN COMPANY
Technical direction & Multimedia Design: Yve Oh
Text & Dramaturgy: Xiaoji Song
Performance & AI Prompting: Yumo Cheng
Alien without Extraordinary Ability is a performance that questions the sentimental politics of (non)belonging, migration and (un)voluntary desire through the lens of an East Alien playing the role of an East Asian on Earth.
Through autofictional reading, chewing, playing and dancing, Alien without Extraordinary Ability is a double critique of both authoritarian and liberal violence and a manifesto on the spatial and temporal effects of migration and labor practices and how these effects are examined under the sentimental gaze.
East Alien Company also asks the questions: Who has the ultimate right to define who is or is not the essential worker? Can this right be manipulated? What kind of skills and abilities are needed in a state? What types of labor are counted and included and which are not? This interactive performance aims to collectively re-imagine the new possibilities of being.
This project was originally developed by artist, writer and researcher Xiaoji Song as a conceptual board game with performative elements during a research residency at the University of the Underground in 2021.
As the interdisciplinary performance collective East Alien Company, Yve Oh, Xiaoji Song and Yumo Cheng developed an 18-minute teaser performance during the APAL residency in May 2023 and premiered it at Berlin’s Ringtheater as an invitation to the collective world-building of the game world.
In June 2025, a new 45-minute version was developed for the 100° Diaspora stage marathon, Performing Exile Festival at the Berliner Festspiele.
Screenshots from the video & photo documentation of the Performance at the Berliner Festspiele, June 2025.
Photos: Jacney Chan.
Photo documentation of the teaser performance at the Berliner Ringtheater, Berlin, May 2023.
Courtesy of Asian Performing Artists Lab
Photo: Olivia Kwok