Camille Huang | Creative Process Blog

Feast of Fishbones

“Feast of Fishbones” is an interdisciplinary dance performance that explores an ancestral landscape of identities inside the body and its impulse for transformation through mixed media and the visceral body. The artists create a space where they have the freedom to rebirth into something they’ve imagined, into fictions of their identities. The work is a corporeal song of dreamed creatures where their bodies morph in and out of one another, becoming glimmering monsters, grotesque, delicious and dreamed in alternate timelines. The work is situated in, but not limited to, the bodies within an emerging diasporic culture, new fictions and old myths.

Archetypically seen as meek objects of desire, the performers create into the “third space” of an asian diaspora, reimagining fictions, relations and ecologies.  At a dinner table, the fish is eaten as a symbol for abundance, leaving the bone remnants trailing behind. Playing with the line between visibility and invisibility, the performers dance a guttural trance. They undulate in and out of a kaleidoscopic symmetry. The thread of impulses from one body to the next creates a birth of a morphing creature, both tender and electric.

Feast of Fishbones refers to a consumption of diaspora; remnants hint at a communal eating, a survival and imagining. But, it is not one without conflicts. Beyond a tired searching for a sense of belonging, the work uses fictional world building rooted in ancestral diasporic story to playfully question anonymity, visibility and agency.

Above are clips from a wonderful week at CCOV Residency last week. Here is bits of the process digging into the hybrid fish tale… during our week we explored forms of diasporic ancestral mapping, gestures that live inside the body, play toy worlds next to creatures, and new/old landscapes. The week felt like sewing thread through touchable body and memory. 

Choreography, Artistic direction, and concept by Camille Huang.

Collaborators :
Evelynn Yan - Dance 
Alyssa Allen - Rehearsal Assistance 
Hanako Hoshimi-Caines - Dramaturgy 
Rodolfo Rueda - Sound Design 

Support from Canada Council of the Arts, Aeris Körper, and CCOV. 

This Curiosities blog was written by Camille Huang, who is presenting their work “Feast of Fishbones” in Aeris Körper’s 2025 Here&Now festival. Tickets can be purchased here.