The dance opens with a bespectacled dancer, dressed in a contemporary tracksuit, entering the stage space. She stops at the edge and looks out into the audience, surveying the bodies sitting before her. After taking them in, the dancer heads upstage to a long table. She sets her hands in front of a video camera, and they are projected via a live feed onto an adjacent video screen. She takes a threaded needle and begins to sew into the top layers of her skin (Fig. 1). The dancer does not display any discomfort and she does not pierce all the way through her flesh. Each time the needle emerges from skin, the dancer makes a knot. These knots are small black nodes extruding from the dancer's porcelain skin. The thread between the points is submerged in thin epidermis, tracing a path, but from here to where?

For this special edition of “Critical Stages,” Chambers-Letson and Son meditate on the following questions: What are the exigencies that animate your entry into the field of theatre and performance studies? How does a shared project in Asian American performance offer a range of possibilities for thinking through pressing political questions and crises that seem otherwise insurmountable?