July 9th: 6:30pm
122 Community Center, Manhattan, NY
July 11th: 5:00pm
3AM Theater, Astoria, NY
Concept, Choreography, Performance, Projection: ZIWEI 子维
AI & Technical Development: danzhe chen
Sound: Cece Zhang
Dramaturgy: Jane Su, Ruby Wang
Stage Manager: Minara Ling
HAMLETMACHINE is a solo research-performance that reimagines East German writer Heiner Müller’s 1977 play Die Hamletmaschine through choreography, projection, sound, generative text, and live performance. Moving between dance, experimental theatre, and digital media, the work stages a body caught inside historical ruins and contemporary machines: scrolling feeds, ghostly archives, failed revolutions, inherited scripts, and unstable identities.
Rather than treating Müller’s text as a script to be faithfully staged, HAMLETMACHINE approaches it as an apparatus: a machine of fragments, quotations, ghosts, and unfinished political desires. The performance asks how queer postsocialist memory might appear through glitches, repetitions, bodily exhaustion, and digital overflow. Here, history is not a finished past, but something that continues to flicker through the performer’s body.
For the ChuanFest iteration, HAMLETMACHINE moves from an intimate studio presentation into a more fully realized theatrical environment, with expanded attention to lighting, sound, and projection. Presented shortly before ZIWEI 子维’s relocation from New York City to the Greater Bay Area, the work also carries the charge of departure: a farewell, a malfunction, and a beginning again.
Trigger Warning: loud sound, flashing imagery, strobe lighting, nudity
Tickets Available
7/9 6:30pm @Manhattan:
7/11 5pm @Queens: