SummerWorks Performance Festival is all about new and adventurous works, offering a diverse and boundary-blurring assortment of performances. Now, in its 26th year, the program includes 69 original pieces spanning theatre, music, live art, dance and more. In this series, we talk to this year’s emerging artists.

For this installment, we spoke with performance artist and curator of Duets for Beginners, Clayton Lee.

SDTC: What’s your performance about?

CL: Duets for Beginners is a series of three distinct, but cumulative experiences in which my grandmother teaches me her recipe for wontons and we prepare and serve them to the audience; I find and chat with strangers on Facebook; and my mother and I try to animate her entire collection of 200+ wind-up toys all at once.

Duets for Beginners, at its core, is about how we connect by creating opportunities for those connections. It’s a performance piece that’s generous, playful, and a little bit mischievous.

What led you to come up with the concept?

When I imagined this project, I was thinking a lot about my place or position within the local arts scene. I went to business school. I don’t have formal training in art or performance. So much of this piece and my own practice are responses to that, to the insecurities of my not being a legitimate artist.

I wanted to put that in the forefront (being a “beginner”), to work with my grandmother and mother (neither performers) and use our own lived experiences to invite audiences to engage with us however they wish.

What was the most challenging aspect of this project? Most rewarding?

The most challenging aspect of this project is its contingency. The piece is simple: we’re doing three tasks. Beyond that is the unknown. Anything can happen. It’ll be up to the audience to decide how to respond to the work and up to us to react and adapt. That lack of control is terrifying, of course, but integral to the sense of live-ness that is so essential to this project.

The most rewarding aspect is being able to create a piece and perform with my grandmother and mother. Neither one of them imagined this to be my career path. They wanted me to be an investment banker, yet they’re doing this with me. I hope that really beautiful sense of support translates to the performance.

What do you want audiences to take away?

At the very least, wontons.

I’ve ultimately described Duets for Beginners as an antidote to cynicism. I want audiences to interpret that however they want.

Do any aspects of the play resonate with you personally? 

All of it. Duets for Beginners is all me and my family. Wontons and wind-up toys are my childhood. And Facebook is my present and (inevitable) future.

Duets for Beginners is FREE and runs from Thursday August 4th to Sunday August 14.

Note: This show has multiple venues. Check out the website for a full schedule and list of venues.